


Misselthwaite

by Whit Merule (whit_merule)



Series: In Other People's Sandboxes [9]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Child Neglect, Children, Gardens & Gardening, Gen, Gothic, Misgendering, Mute Sam Winchester, Trans Castiel, Trans Character, deadnaming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-09
Updated: 2016-07-09
Packaged: 2018-07-22 12:40:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 56,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7439764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whit_merule/pseuds/Whit%20Merule
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"When Gabriel Milton was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with his uncle, everybody said he was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too..."</p><p>And so we begin. But of course, at Misselthwaite in Yorkshire this poor, neglected, highly spoiled child from British India learns a new interest in the world, in the company of three other boys he meets there.</p><p>A <i>Secret Garden</i> fusion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. There's no one left to come

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2016 Gabriel Big Bang; but the art is my own. If you want it all in one place rather than scattered through the fic, see [the tumblr header post](http://whitmerule.tumblr.com/post/147139464440/artheader-post-for-my-gabriel-big-bang-a-secret)!

When Gabriel Milton was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with his uncle, everybody said he was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.

It was true, too. He had a pointy thin face and a pointy thin body, thin light hair and a sharp, sour expression. His hair was yellow, and his face was yellow, because he had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. The elder of his two fathers had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and ill himself; and his younger father had some important position in the missionary church, but for all that Gabriel saw seemed to care only to go to parties and laugh withpeople in glittering clothes. His name was Luke, and sometimes at first he had amused himself with the child’s gurgles and playfulness for an hour or two; but Gabriel’s older father Michael had not wanted a little boy at all, and so when Gabriel was born he had been handed over to the care of an Ayah, who was made to understand that if she wished to please the Sahibs she must keep the child out of sight as much as possible.

So when Gabriel was a sickly, fretful, ugly little baby he was kept out of the way, and when he became a sickly, fretful, toddling thing he was kept out of the way also. He never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of his Ayah and the other native servants, and they always obeyed him and gave him his own way in everything, because the Sahibs would be angry if they were disturbed by his crying. And so by the time he was six years old he was as tyrannical and mischievous a little pig as ever lived. The young English schoolmaster who came to teach him to read and write disliked him so much that he gave up his place in three months, and when other schoolmasters came to try to fill it they always went away in a shorter time than the first one. So if Gabriel had not chosen to really want to know how to read books he would never have learned his letters at all.

One frightfully hot morning, when he was about nine years old, he awakened feeling very cross, and he became crosser still when he saw that the servant who stood by his bedside was not his Ayah.

“You,” he said to the strange man, “why are _you_ here? Send my Ayah to me, or I shall call down the _angels_ of the _Christian God_ , and they will pinch your toes and ears for _days_.”

The man looked frightened, but he only stammered that the Ayah could not come. When Gabriel threw himself into a passion and beat and kicked him, he only looked more frightened, and repeated that it was not possible for the Ayah to come to Master Sahib.

There was something mysterious in the air that morning. Nothing was done in its regular order and several of the native servants seemed missing, while those whom Gabriel saw slunk or hurried about with ashy and scared faces. But no one would tell him anything, and his Ayah did not come. He was actually left alone as the morning went on, and at last he wandered out into the garden and began to play by himself under a tree near the veranda. He pretended that he was making a flower-bed, and he stuck big scarlet hibiscus blossoms into little heaps of earth, all the time growing more and more angry and muttering to himself the things he would say and the names he would call his Ayah when she returned.

“Pig! Pig! Daughter of Pigs!” he said, because to call a native a pig is the worst insult of all.

He was grinding his teeth and saying this over and over again when he heard his older father come out onto the verandah with someone: a fair young officer. They were talking in low voices. The child stared at the officer, but mostly he stared at his father. He always did this when he had a chance to see him, because the Sahib Michael was such a tall, pale, commanding person, who always seemed to gather the room about him, and could make any person seem small and unimportant merely by looking at them. He looked paler than ever this morning, but his eyes had no disdain in them at all. They were tight and worried, and he looked at the boy officer almost as if he were scared.

“So bad as that?” Gabriel heard him say.

“Awfully,” the young man answered in a trembling voice. “Awfully bad, sir. You ought to have gone to the hills two weeks ago.”

“I know we _ought_ ,” cried the Sahib impatiently; “we only stayed because my husband had determined so on that ridiculous dinner party. But _ought_ does no good now. The devil on his dissipations—what a fool I am!”

At that very moment such a loud sound of wailing broke out from the servants’ quarters that Gabriel stood shivering from head to foot, and his father’s face passed from anger to something more awful still. The wailing grew wilder and wilder.

“Some one has died,” gasped the boy officer. “You did not say it had broken out among your servants.”

“How should I know such a thing as that?” the Sahib snapped. “Come with me!” and he turned and ran into the house.

After that, appalling things happened, and the mysteriousness of the morning was explained. The cholera had broken out in its most fatal form and people were dying like flies. The Ayah had been taken ill in the night, and it was because she had just died that the servants had wailed in the huts. Before the next day three other servants were dead and others had run away in terror. There was panic on every side, and dying people in all the bungalows.

During the confusion and bewilderment of the second day Gabriel hid himself in the nursery and was forgotten by everyone. He only knew that people were ill and that he heard mysterious and frightening sounds, and things were being carried in and out of the bungalow. He alternately cried and sulked and slept through the hours. At last he fell into a deep sleep because he was so tired, and angry, and hungry.

When he awakened he lay and stared at the wall. The house was perfectly still. He had never known it to be so silent before. He heard neither voices nor footsteps, and wondered if everybody had got well of the cholera and all the trouble was over. He wondered also who would take care of him now his Ayah was dead. There would be a new Ayah, and perhaps she would know some new stories. Gabriel had been rather tired of the old ones. Or perhaps he would have a master now—he was getting rather too old for a nurse, after all—and the master would teach him interesting things, and show him how to ride horses, and how to speak like a man, so that he might go into company and do as his fathers did.

He did not cry because his nurse had died. He had never learned to be an affectionate child, although he had perhaps the seeds of it, somewhere deep in his nature. The noise and hurrying about and wailing over the cholera had frightened him, and he had been angry because he was frightened, and because no one seemed to remember that he was alive. Everyone was too panic-stricken to think of a little boy no one was fond of. When people had the cholera it seemed that they remembered nothing but themselves. But if everyone had got well again, surely some one would remember and come to look for him.

Almost the next minute he heard footsteps in the compound, and then on the veranda. They were men’s footsteps, and the men entered the bungalow and talked in low voices. No one went to meet or speak to them and they seemed to open doors and look into rooms.

“What desolation!” Gabriel heard one voice say. “Those gallant young men—and the young Captain, so promising a career! I suppose the child, too. I heard there was a child, though no one ever saw him.”

Gabriel was standing in the middle of the nursery when they opened the door a few minutes later. He looked an ugly, cross little thing and was frowning because he was beginning to be hungry and feel disgracefully neglected. The first man who came in was a large officer he had once seen talking to his fathers. He looked tired and troubled, but when he saw Gabriel he was so startled that he almost jumped back.

“The devil!” he cried out. “There is a child here! A child alone! In a place like this! Mercy on us, who is he!”

“I am Gabriel Milton,” the little boy said, crossing his arms arrogantly over his chest as he had seen his fathers do. “I fell asleep when everyone had the cholera and I have only just wakened up. Why does nobody come?”

“It is the child no one ever saw!” exclaimed the man, turning to his companions. “He has actually been forgotten!”

“Why was I forgotten?” Gabriel said, stamping his foot. “Why does nobody come?”

The officer looked at him very sadly.

“Poor little kid!” he said. “There is nobody left to come.”

It was in that strange and sudden way that Gabriel found out that he had not one father left; that they had died and been carried away in the night, and that the few native servants who had not died also had left the house as quickly as they could get out of it, none of them even remembering that there was a Master Sahib. That was why the place was so quiet. There was no one in the bungalow but himself.


	2. Across the moor

Gabriel had liked to look at his fathers from a distance and had thought them very fine and grand, but as he knew very little of them he could scarcely have been expected to love them, or to miss them very much when they were gone. He did not miss them at all, in fact; and as he was a self-absorbed child he gave his entire thought to himself, as he had always done. If he had been older he would no doubt have been very anxious at being left alone in the world, but he was very young, and as he had always been taken care of, he supposed he always would be.

He knew that he was not going to stay at the English clergyman’s house where he was taken at first. He did not want to stay. The English clergyman was poor and he had five children nearly all the same age and they wore shabby clothes and were always quarrelling and snatching toys from each other. Gabriel hated their untidy bungalow, and set about punishing them for it with all the most disagreeable tricks and jibes he could imagine, so that after the first day or two nobody would play with him. By the second day they had taken to jeering at him, and calling him names which made him furious.

When the clergyman told him that night that he was going to sail away to England in a few days and go to his uncle, Mr. Charles Shurley, who lived at Misselthwaite Manor, Gabriel looked so naughty and stubbornly uninterested that they did not know what to think about him. They tried to be kind to him, but he only turned his face away when the clergyman patted his shoulder, and threw something at one of the other children.

Gabriel made the long voyage to England under the care of an officer’s wife, who was taking her children to leave them in a boarding-school. She was very much absorbed in her own little boy and girl, and was rather glad to hand the child over to the woman Mr. Charles Shurley sent to meet him, in London. The woman was his housekeeper at Misselthwaite Manor, and her name was Mrs. Naomi Medlock. She was a tall woman of brisk and neat appearance, with a sharp slim figure and sharp blue eyes. She wore a severe grey dress, a black silk mantle with jet fringe on it and a black bonnet with no decoration at all. Gabriel did not like her at all, but as he very seldom liked people there was nothing remarkable in that; besides which it was very evident Mrs. Medlock did not think much of him.

“What a scrawny, sly-looking, pettish thing he is!” she said. “And his fathers so manly, and with such fine manners, they say. They haven’t handed much of it down, have they?”

“Perhaps if they had carried their fine manners oftener into the nursery, the child might have turned out better,” the officer’s wife said good-naturedly. “It comes of leaving a child to the natives to attend, you know. I always say one ought to keep a good English girl in the household, especially when there is no mother in the question, to fuss over a young child in the proper manner and teach it how to behave. But I daresay he will improve if he’s taken in hand—children alter so much.”

“He’ll have to alter a good deal,” answered Mrs. Medlock. “And there’s nothing likely to improve children at Misselthwaite—if you ask me! It’s certain the master will want very little to do with him.”

They thought Gabriel was not listening because he was standing a little apart from them at the window of the private hotel they had gone to. He was watching the passing buses and cabs and people, but he heard quite well and was made very curious about his uncle and the place he lived in. What sort of a place was it, and what would Mr. Shurley be like? The clergyman’s wife had said he was a hunchback. What was a hunchback? Gabriel had never seen one. Perhaps there were none in India.

Since he had been living in other people’s houses and had had no Ayah, he had begun to feel lonely and to think queer thoughts which were new to him. He had begun to wonder why he had never seemed to belong to anyone even when his fathers had been alive. Other children seemed to belong to their fathers and mothers, but Gabriel had never seemed to really be anyone’s little boy. He had had servants, and food and clothes, but no one had taken any notice of him. He did not know that this was because he was a selfish and disagreeable child; but then, of course, he did not know he was either of these things.

He thought Mrs. Medlock very disagreeable indeed, with her blunt, gossiping ways and her bright eyes that seemed to look straight through him. When the next day they set out on their journey to Yorkshire, Gabriel walked through the station to the railway carriage with his head up and trying to keep as far away from her as she could, because he did not want to seem to belong to her.

Gabriel sat in his corner of the railway carriage and looked spoiled and naughty. He had nothing to read or to look at, and he could not keep his thin little hands neatly folded in his lap, nor keep his feet from kicking sullenly at the bench in front of him. His black clothes made him look yellower than ever. Before long, feeling contrary and seeing that Mrs. Medlock had rather read her book than talk to him, he began to chatter as only he knew how to do, with all the most impertinent and tiresome observations on every passing field and stile that came into his head. He had found that when he did this, with only a pause here and there to let them hope he was done before he started up again, grown-ups would either grow cross enough to argue with him or else put themselves to some trouble to come up with some other amusement; and he hardly cared which it might be.

Mrs. Medlock was the kind of woman to “stand no nonsense from young ones”; and at last she got tired of listening to Gabriel and began to talk in a brisk, hard voice.

“I suppose I may as well tell you something about where you are going to,” she said. “Do you know anything about your uncle?”

“No,” said Gabriel.

“Never heard your parents talk about him?”

“No,” said Gabriel frowning. He frowned because he remembered that his fathers had never talked to him about anything in particular. Certainly they had never told him things. “I did not know that I had an uncle.”

“Humph,” muttered Mrs. Medlock, staring at his queer, unresponsive little face. She did not say any more for a few moments and then she began again. “I suppose you might as well be told something—to prepare you. You are going to a queer place. Not but that it’s a grand big place in a gloomy way, and Mr. Shurley’s proud of it in his way—and that’s gloomy enough, too. The house is six hundred years old and it’s on the edge of the moor, and there’s near a hundred rooms in it, though most of them’s shut up and locked. And there’s pictures and fine old furniture and things that’s been there for ages, and there’s a big park round it and gardens and trees with branches trailing to the ground—some of them.” She paused and took another breath. “But there’s nothing else,” she ended suddenly.

Gabriel had begun to listen in spite of himself. It all sounded so unlike India, and anything new rather attracted him, and made him imagine wild and lonely stories. But he did not intend to look as if he were interested, and so he crossed his arms over his chest, and slumped lower into his seat, and scowled.

“Well,” said Mrs. Medlock. “What do you think of it?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Gabriel, “what I think about it at all.”

“You are right enough there,” said Mrs. Medlock. “It doesn’t. What you’re to be kept at Misselthwaite Manor for I don’t know, unless because it’s the easiest way. He’s not going to trouble himself about you, that’s sure and certain. He never troubles himself about no one, not even—”

She stopped herself as if she had just remembered something in time.

“He’s got a crooked back,” she said. “That set him wrong. He was an aimless young man, always taken up with his scribblings and his travelling to far-away places, and got no good of all his money and big place till he was married.”

Gabriel’s eyes turned toward her in spite of his intention not to seem to care. He had never thought of the hunchback’s being married and he was a trifle surprised. Mrs. Medlock saw this, and she continued with more interest. This was one way of passing some of the time, at any rate.

“I suppose you know that she was a sweet, pretty thing: the kindest of hearts, but a will strong as a rock. Nobody less could have made anything of him; and he, well, he’d have walked the world over to get her a blade o’ grass she wanted. Nobody thought she’d marry him, but she did, and people said she married him for his money. But she didn’t—she didn’t,” positively. “When she died—”

“Oh! did she die!” Gabriel exclaimed, quite without meaning to.

“Did your fathers never tell you _that_? Yes, she died,” Mrs. Medlock answered. “And it made him queerer than ever. He cares about nobody. He won’t see people. Most of the time he goes away, and when he is at Misselthwaite he shuts himself up in the West Wing with his books and won’t let any one see him.”

It sounded like something in a book and it did not make Gabriel feel cheerful. A house with a hundred rooms, nearly all shut up and with their doors locked—a house on the edge of a moor—whatsoever a moor was—sounded dreary. He stared out of the window, and it seemed quite natural that the rain should have begun to pour down in grey slanting lines and splash and stream down the window-panes.

“You needn’t expect to see him, because ten to one you won’t,” said Mrs. Medlock. “And you mustn’t expect that there will be people to talk to you. You’ll have to play about and look after yourself. You’ll be told what rooms you can go into and what rooms you’re to keep out of. There’s gardens enough. But when you’re in the house don’t go wandering and poking about. Mr. Shurley won’t have it.”

“I shall not want to go poking about,” said obstinate little Gabriel; and just as suddenly as he had begun to be rather sorry for Mr. Charles Shurley he began to cease to be sorry and to think he was unpleasant enough to deserve all that had happened to him.

 

 

Gabriel slept at last, and it was quite dark when he awakened. The train had stopped at a station and Mrs. Medlock was shaking him.

“You have had a sleep!” she said. “It’s time to open your eyes! We’re at Thwaite Station and we’ve got a long drive before us.”

The station was a small one and nobody but themselves seemed to be getting out of the train. The station-master spoke to Mrs. Medlock in a rough, good-natured way, pronouncing his words in a queer broad fashion which Gabriel found out afterward was Yorkshire.

“I see tha’s got back,” he said. “An’ tha’s browt th’ young ‘un with thee.”

“Aye, that’s him,” answered Mrs. Medlock, speaking with a Yorkshire accent herself and jerking her head over her shoulder toward Gabriel. “How’s thy Missus?”

“Well enow. Th’ carriage is waitin’ outside for thee.”

It was a smart carriage; and when they drove off, the little boy found himself seated in a comfortably cushioned corner, but he was not inclined to go to sleep again. He climbed up onto his knees and looked out of the window, curious to see something of the road over which he was being driven to the queer place Mrs. Medlock had spoken of. There was a lively curiosity in his nature, though it had been rather dampened by his upbringing; and there was stirring within him the beginnings even of a sense of adventure, for now that he had slept he felt that there was no knowing what might happen in a house with a hundred rooms nearly all shut up—a house standing on the edge of a moor.

“What is a moor?” he said suddenly to Mrs. Medlock.

“Look out of the window in about ten minutes and you’ll see,” the woman answered. “We’ve got to drive five miles across Missel Moor before we get to the Manor. You won’t see much because it’s a dark night, but you can see something.”

Gabriel asked no more questions but waited in the darkness of his corner, balancing against the sill of the window. The carriage lamps cast rays of light a little distance ahead of them and he caught glimpses of the things they passed. After they had left the station there seemed nothing different for a long time—or at least it seemed a long time to him.

At last the horses began to go more slowly, as if they were climbing up-hill, and presently there seemed to be no more hedges and no more trees. He could see nothing, in fact, but a dense darkness on either side. He leaned forward and pressed his face against the window just as the carriage gave a big jolt.

“Eh! We’re on the moor now sure enough,” said Mrs. Medlock.

The carriage lamps shed a yellow light on a rough-looking road which seemed to be cut through bushes and low-growing things which ended in the great expanse of dark apparently spread out before and around them. A wind was rising and making a singular, wild, low, rushing sound.

“It’s not the sea, is it?” said Gabriel, looking round at his companion.

“No, not it,” answered Mrs. Medlock. “Nor it isn’t fields nor mountains, it’s just miles and miles and miles of wild land that nothing grows on but heather and gorse and broom, and nothing lives on but wild ponies and sheep.”

On and on they drove through the darkness. Gabriel felt as if the drive would never come to an end and that the wide, bleak moor was a wide expanse of black ocean through which he was passing on a strip of dry land.

The horses were climbing up a hilly piece of road when he first caught sight of a light. Mrs. Medlock saw it as soon as he did and drew a long sigh of relief

“Eh, I am glad to see that bit o’ light twinkling,” she exclaimed. “We shall get a good cup of tea after a bit, at all events.”

They drove through the park gates and into a long, dark avenue, where the trees seemed to meet overhead; and at last out into a clear space, where they stopped before an immensely long but low-built house which seemed to ramble round a stone court.

The entrance door was a huge one made of massive, curiously shaped panels of oak. It opened into an enormous hall, which was so dimly lighted that the faces in the portraits on the walls and the figures in the suits of armour made Gabriel feel that he did not want to look at them. As he stood on the stone floor he looked a very small, odd little black figure.

A neat, thin old man stood near the manservant who opened the door for them.

“You are to take him to his room,” he said in a husky voice. “The master doesn’t want to see him. He’s going to London in the morning.”

And so Gabriel Milton was led up a broad staircase and down a long corridor and up a short flight of steps and through another corridor and another, until a door opened in a wall and he found himself in a room with a fire in it and a supper on a table.

Mrs. Medlock said unceremoniously: “Well, here you are! This room and the next are where you’ll live—and you must keep to them. Don’t you forget that!”

It was in this way Master Gabriel arrived at Misselthwaite Manor, and he had perhaps never felt quite so obstinate and sullen in all his life.


	3. "I'm not lonely!"

When Gabriel opened his eyes in the morning it was because a housemaid had come into his room to light the fire and was kneeling on the hearth-rug raking out the cinders noisily. Gabriel lay and watched her for a few moments and then began to look about the room. He had never seen a room at all like it and thought it curious and gloomy. The walls were covered with tapestry with a forest scene embroidered on it. Out of a deep window he could see a great climbing stretch of land which seemed to have no trees on it, and to look rather like an endless, dull, purplish sea.

“What is that?” he said, pointing out of the window.

Mary, the housemaid, who had just risen to her feet, looked and pointed also.

“That’s th’ moor,” with a warm smile. “Does tha’ like it?”

“No,” answered Gabriel. “I hate it.”

“That’s because tha’rt not used to it,” Mary said, going back to her hearth. “Tha’ thinks it’s too big an’ bare now. But tha’ will like it.”

“Do you?” inquired Gabriel.

“Aye, that I do,” answered Mary. “I just love it. It’s none bare. It’s covered wi’ growin’ things as smells sweet. It’s fair lovely in spring an’ summer when th’ gorse an’ broom an’ heather’s in flower—an’ th’ sky looks so high an’ th’ bees an’ skylarks makes such a nice noise hummin’ an’ singin’. Eh! I wouldn’t live away from th’ moor for anythin’.”

Gabriel listened to her with a curious, puzzled expression. The native servants he had been used to in India were not in the least like this. They were obsequious and servile and did not presume to talk to their masters as if they were their equals. It was not the custom to say “please” and “thank you” and Gabriel had always slapped his Ayah in the face when he was angry. He wondered a little what this woman would do if one slapped her in the face. She was a handsome, motherly-looking creature, but she had a no-nonsense way which made Master Gabriel wonder if she might not even spank him in return.

“You are a strange servant,” he said from his pillows, rather haughtily.

Mary sat up on her heels, with her blacking brush in her hand, and laughed, without seeming the least out of temper.

“Eh! I know that,” she said. “If there was a grand Missus at Misselthwaite I should never have been even one o’ th’ under housemaids. I might have been let to be scullery-maid but I’d never have been let upstairs. I’m too common an’ I talk too much Yorkshire. But this is a funny house for all it’s so grand. Seems like there’s neither Master nor Mistress except Mr. Pitcher an’ Mrs. Medlock. Mr. Shurley, he won’t be troubled about anythin’ when he’s here, an’ he’s nearly always away. Mrs. Medlock gave me th’ place out o’ kindness when my John died, to keep my two boys fed, because she and I was at school together when we was young. She told me she could never have done it if Misselthwaite had been like other big houses.”

“Are you going to be my servant?” Gabriel asked, still in his imperious little Indian way.

Mary began to rub her grate again.

“I’m Mrs. Medlock’s servant,” she said stoutly. “An’ she’s Mr. Shurley’s—but I’m to do the housemaid’s work up here an’ wait on you a bit. But you won’t need much waitin’ on.”

“Who is going to dress me?” demanded Gabriel.

Mary sat up on her heels again and stared. She spoke in broad Yorkshire in her amazement.

“Canna’ tha’ dress thysen!” she said.

“What do you mean? I don’t understand your language,” said Gabriel.

“Eh! I forgot,” Mary said. “I mean can’t you put on your own clothes?”

“No,” answered Gabriel, quite indignantly. “I never did in my life. My Ayah dressed me, of course.”

“Well,” said Mary, evidently not in the least caring that she was impudent, “it’s time tha’ should learn. Tha’ cannot begin younger. It’ll do thee good to wait on thysen a bit. My youngest has been dressin’ hissel’ these five year, for all he’s not eight year old, and th’ elder did it for him afore that.”

“It is different in India,” said Master Gabriel disdainfully. He could scarcely stand this.

“Eh! I can see it’s different,” she said, almost sympathetically. “But it’s time for thee to get up now. Mrs. Medlock said I was to carry tha’ breakfast an’ tea an’ dinner into th’ room next to this. It’s been made into a nursery for thee. I’ll help thee on wi’ thy clothes this once, if tha’ll climb on out o’ bed.”

It had not been the custom that Master Gabriel should do anything but stand and allow himself to be dressed like a doll, but before he was ready for breakfast he began to suspect that his life at Misselthwaite Manor would end by teaching him a number of things quite new to him—things such as putting on his own britches and tying his shoes, and picking up things he let fall.

Mary, not being the quiet and subservient kind of servant, and taking a fond sort of interest in this lonely, cross little child, talked as she dressed him; and she talked for the most part about her own cottage in the village, and her own boys who lived there with her mother. At first Gabriel only listened to her coldly and wondered at her freedom of manner, but gradually he began to notice what she was saying.

“The two of them, they tumble about on th’ moor an’ play there all day when I’m up here at th’ manor. An’ I’d swear to it th’ air of th’ moor fattens ‘em, or they eat th’ grass same as th’ wild ponies do. My Sam, he’s got a young pony he calls his own.”

“Where did he get it?” asked Gabriel.

“He found it on th’ moor with its mother when it was a little one an’ he began to make friends with it an’ give it bits o’ bread an’ pluck young grass for it. And it got to like him so it follows him about an’ it lets the boys get on its back. Dean’s a good lad an’ animals likes him; and as for my Sam, sometimes I’d swear he speaks their very language.”

Gabriel had never possessed an animal pet of his own and had always thought he should like one. So he began to feel a slight interest in Dean and Sam, and as he had never before been interested in any one but himself, it was the dawning of a healthy sentiment. When he went into the room which had been made into a nursery for him, he found that it was rather like the one he had slept in. It was not a child’s room, but a grown-up person’s room, with gloomy old pictures on the walls and heavy old oak chairs. A table in the centre was set with a good substantial breakfast. But he had always had a very small appetite, and he looked with something more than indifference at the first plate Mary set before him.

“I don’t want it,” she said.

“Tha’ doesn’t know how good it is. Put a bit o’ treacle on it or a bit o’ sugar.”

“I don’t want it,” repeated Gabriel.

“Eh!” said Mary. “I can’t abide to see good victuals go to waste. If my boys was at this table they’d clean it bare in five minutes.”

“Why?” said Gabriel curiously.

“Why!” echoed Mary. “Because they scarce ever had their stomachs full in their lives. They’re as hungry as young hawks an’ foxes.”

“I don’t know what it is to be hungry,” said Gabriel.

Mary looked stern. “Well, it would do thee good to try it. I can see that plain enough,” she said. “I’ve no patience with folk as sits an’ just stares at good bread an’ meat. My word! don’t I wish my boys had what’s here in their pockets.”

“Why don’t you take it to them?” suggested Gabriel.

“It’s not mine to take,” answered Mary stoutly.

Gabriel drank some tea and ate a little toast and some marmalade.

“You wrap up warm an’ run out an’ play, you,” said Mary. “It’ll do you good and give you some stomach for your meat. You’re too skinny for a boy of your years.”

Gabriel went to the window. There were gardens and paths and big trees, but everything looked dull and wintry.

“Out? Why should I go out on a day like this?”

“Well, if tha’ doesn’t go out tha’lt have to stay in, an’ what has tha’ got to do?”

Gabriel glanced about him. There was nothing to do. When Mrs. Medlock had prepared the nursery she had not thought of amusement. Perhaps it would be better to go and see what the gardens were like.

“Who will go with me?” he inquired.

“You’ll go by yourself,” answered Mary briskly, tidying up the breakfast things. “You’ll have to learn to play like other children does when they haven’t got sisters and brothers. My Dean goes off on th’ moor by himself an’ plays for hours, and Sam follows him everywhere—when he’s not with Mother, that is. That’s how they made friends with th’ pony. Dean knows every nook and hollow on those hills, and every growing thing as lives there, an’ where every fox has its den. An’ Sam’s got sheep on th’ moor that knows him, an’ birds as comes an’ eats out of his hands. However little there is to eat, Sam always saves a bit o’ his bread to coax his pets.”

It was really this mention of Dean and Sam which made Gabriel decide to go out, though he was not aware of it. There would be birds outside though there would not be ponies or sheep. They would be different from the birds in India, and it might amuse him to look at them.

Mary found his coat and hat for him and a pair of stout little boots and she showed him his way downstairs.

“If tha’ goes round that way tha’ll come to th’ gardens,” she said, pointing to a gate in a wall of shrubbery. “There’s lots o’ flowers in summer-time, but there’s nothin’ bloomin’ now.” She seemed to looked at him thoughtfully for a second before she added, “One of th’ gardens is locked up. No one has been in it for ten years.”

“Why?” asked Gabriel at once. Here was another locked door added to the hundred in the strange house.

“Mr. Shurley had it shut when his wife died so sudden. He won’t let no one go inside. It was her garden. He shut it up, and locked th’ door an’ dug a hole and buried th’ key.”

“How can a garden be shut up?” asked Gabriel scornfully. “You can always walk into a garden.

“There’s Mrs. Medlock’s bell ringing,” said Mary with a smile, though Gabriel could hear nothing. “I must run.”

After she was gone Gabriel turned down the walk which led to the door in the shrubbery. He could not help thinking about the garden which no one had been into for ten years. He wondered what it would look like and whether there were any flowers still alive in it. When he had passed through the shrubbery gate he found himself in great gardens, with wide lawns and winding walks with clipped borders. There were trees, and flower-beds, and evergreens clipped into strange shapes, and a large pool with an old grey fountain in its midst. But the flower-beds were bare and wintry and the fountain was not playing. This was not the garden which was shut up.

He was just thinking this when he saw that, at the end of the path he was following, there seemed to be a long wall, with ivy growing over it. He was not familiar enough with England to know that he was coming upon the kitchen gardens where the vegetables and fruit were growing. He went toward the wall and found that there was a green door in the ivy, and that it stood open. This was not the closed garden, evidently, and he could go into it.

He went through the door and found that it was a garden with walls all round it and that it was only one of several walled gardens, which seemed to open into one another. He saw another open green door, revealing bushes and pathways between beds containing winter vegetables. Fruit-trees were trained flat against the wall, and over some of the beds there were glass frames. The place was bare and ugly enough, Gabriel thought, as he stood and stared about him. It might be nicer in summer when things were green, but there was nothing pretty about it now.

In the last of the gardens there was an orchard. There were walls all round it also and trees trained against them, and there were bare fruit-trees growing in the winter-browned grass—but there was no green door to be seen anywhere. Gabriel looked for it, and yet when he had entered the upper end of the garden he had noticed that the wall did not seem to end with the orchard but to extend beyond it as if it enclosed a place at the other side. He could see the tops of trees above the wall, and when he stood still he saw a bird with a bright red breast sitting on the topmost branch of one of them, and suddenly he burst into his winter song—almost as if he had caught sight of Gabriel and was calling to him.

Gabriel stopped and listened, and somehow the cheerful, friendly little whistle gave him a pleased feeling. Even a disagreeable little boy may be lonely, and the big closed house and big bare moor and big bare gardens had made this one feel as if there was no one left in the world but himself. His unloved little heart was growing quite desolate; but the bright-breasted little bird brought a look into his hard little face which was almost a smile. He listened to him until he flew away. He was not like an Indian bird and Gabriel liked him and wondered if he should ever see him again. Perhaps he lived in the mysterious garden and knew all about it.

Perhaps it was because Gabriel had nothing whatever to do that he thought so much of the deserted garden. He was curious about it and wanted to see what it was like. He wondered why Mr. Charles Shurley had buried the key. Gabriel wondered if he should ever see him, but he knew that if he ever did they should not like one another, and that Gabriel should only stand and stare at him and then perhaps say something quite impertinent so as to break the silence. After all, people never liked him, and he never liked people, except to watch them, and to make up stories about them in his own head.

He thought of the robin and of the way he seemed to sing his song at Gabriel, and as he remembered the tree-top he perched on he stopped rather suddenly on the path.

“I believe that tree was in the secret garden—I feel sure it was,” he said to himself. “There was a wall round the place and there was no door.”

He walked back into the first kitchen garden and turned another way down onto a long gravel walk by a low wall. On this wall a boy was sitting, whistling and kicking his heels against the stone. There was a great shaggy black bird sitting in the tree over his head, but the boy did not seem afraid. He did not stop whistling when he saw Gabriel, but he looked at him with what Gabriel thought was terrible impertinence. He was really only very interested; but Gabriel was not yet accustomed to being looked at so frankly, nor to talking to other children, and he thought the boy must be laughing at him. The boy had bright green eyes, and tousled hair, and freckles, and he was dressed rather like the gardeners that Gabriel had seen here and there in the distance. Gabriel addressed him abruptly and haughtily, as if he were a servant.

“I have been into the other gardens,” he said.

The boy said nothing, only kept on whistling and looking at Gabriel with his bright eyes.

“I went into the orchard,” Gabriel went on.

“There were nothin’ to prevent thee,” the boy answered.

“There was no door there into the other garden,” said Gabriel.

“What garden?” said the other boy in an interested voice, and stopped his kicking at the wall.

“The one on the other side of the wall,” answered Master Gabriel. “There are rose trees there—I saw the tops of them. Where is the green door? There must be a door somewhere.”

“There were ten year ago,” said the boy, as if he knew an important secret, “but there isn’t now.”

“No door!” cried Gabriel. “There must be.”

“None as a body can find,” said the boy mysteriously, and winked in what Gabriel thought was a terribly teasing way.

“But I want to see the rose trees,” said Gabriel, with a petulant little stamp of his foot. “A bird with a red breast was sitting on one of them and he sang.”

A bright smile spread across the boy’s open, curious face. It made his freckles stand out more than ever; but it also made Gabriel think that it was curious how much nicer a person looked when he smiled. He had not thought of it before.

He stood up on the wall and ran quickly and easily along its top to the end nearest the kitchen gardens. There he began to whistle, a low soft whistle.

Almost the next moment a wonderful thing happened. Gabriel heard a soft little rushing flight through the air—and it was the bird with the red breast flying to them, and he actually alighted on the stone of the wall quite near to the boy’s foot.

“Here he is,” chuckled the boy, and then he crouched down and spoke to the bird as if he were speaking to a child.

“Where has tha’ been, tha’ cheeky little beggar?” he said. “I’ve not seen thee before today. Has tha’ begun tha’ courtin’ this early in th’ year? Tha’rt too forrad.”

The bird put his tiny head on one side and looked up at him with his soft bright eye which was like a black dewdrop. He seemed quite familiar and not the least afraid. He hopped about and pecked the cracks between the stones briskly, looking for seeds and insects. It actually gave Gabriel a queer feeling in his heart, because he was so pretty and cheerful and seemed so like a person. He had a tiny plump body and a delicate beak, and slender delicate legs.

“Will he always come when you call him?” he asked almost in a whisper.

“Aye, that he will. We’ve knowed him ever since he was a fledgling. He come out of th’ nest in th’ other garden an’ when first he flew over th’ wall he was too weak to fly back for a few days an’ we got friendly wi’ him, an’ then when he went over th’ wall again th’ rest of th’ brood was gone an’ he was lonely an’ he come back to us. He comes to see us yet whenever we’s about th’ place.”

“What kind of a bird is he?” Gabriel asked.

The boy scrunched up his eyes and his nose as if he might be about to laugh. “Doesn’t tha’ know? He’s a robin redbreast. They’re th’ friendliest, curiousest birds alive, almost as friendly as dogs if you know how to get on with ‘em. See, he’s peckin’ about there, and hoppin’, an’ lookin’ round at us now an’ again, almost like he’s winkin’ at us. He knows we’re talkin’ about him.”

The robin hopped about busily pecking the stones and now and then stopped and looked at them a little. Gabriel thought his black dewdrop eyes gazed at him with great curiosity. It really seemed as if he were finding out all about him.

“Where did the rest of the brood fly to?” he asked.

“There’s no knowin’. The old ones turn ‘em out o’ their nest an’ make em fly an’ they’re scattered before you know it. This one was a knowin’ one an’ he knew he was lonely—as lonely as tha’ art.”

Gabriel had never thought that he might be lonely. He had not known that this was one of the things which made him feel sulky and cross. He seemed to find it out when the robin looked at him and he looked at the robin. But he did not like the way the other boy was looking at him; and besides, he was not used to talking to other children without being teased. So he went very red and clenched his fists.

“I’m not lonely!” he said hotly.

“Tha’rt th’ little lad from India?” asked the other boy curiously.

Gabriel nodded.

“Then tha’lt be lonelier before tha’s done,” the boy said. He hopped down from the wall and stood, looking Gabriel up and down. “When I heard you was comin’ from India I thought you was a black.”

“What!” Gabriel cried furiously. “What! You thought I was a native. You—you son of a pig!”

The boy stared at him, but he did not look angry in return; in fact, his wide grin grew wider still. “I’ve nothin’ against th’ blacks. I read about ‘em in a book once, and they were very religious. It said as a black’s a man an’ a brother. I’ve never seen a black an’ I was fair pleased to think I was goin’ to see one close. But there you are, no more black than me—for all you’re so yeller.”

He spoke in a teasing way, though not at all as if he meant to be unkind; but hot-tempered little Gabriel did not know the difference. For a moment he thought he might hit the boy, although he _was_ older and stouter than Gabriel was. He stamped his foot instead.

“You thought I was a native! You dared! You don’t know anything about natives! They are not people—they’re servants who must salaam to you. You know nothing about India. You know nothing about me. You know nothing about anything!”

At that the robin scolded and chirped, and flirted his tail, and darted away again over the walls into the kitchen gardens.

“There now,” said the boy, half scolding and half gentle, “tha’s ruffled his feathers. He won’t be back today.” And he hopped up onto the wall again, and slipped down the other side, and strolled off whistling, with his hands in his pockets. The strangest thing was that, as he left, the big black bird who had been sitting in the tree gave a loud, grating cry and leaped from the tree. It flapped its heavy wings once or twice, then it soared away in the direction that the boy was walking, as if it wanted to see what he would do next.

Gabriel was left in no very peaceable mood, and feeling rather sorry for himself; and maybe just a little lonely after all.


	4. "There was someone crying!"

Gabriel woke the next morning in a restless pet. He had not slept well, for it seemed to him that he had heard somebody crying in the night, only when he had woken up it had always seemed to be only the wind. He did not want to go outside, although he was more interested in the garden and the birds than he had been in anything for years. He did not like to think of it, though; and the way that the boy and the robin had looked at him—as if they understood him better than he did himself—had made him feel queer inside, and not altogether pleased with himself.

He was not accustomed, however, to thinking about what he had done wrong nor how he might do better; and so he thought only that the boy had been very disagreeable, and the gardens tiresome and quiet; and so, after he had eaten so much of the porridge as would satisfy Mary, he crept out of his rooms after her and found his way down to the servant’s hall and the kitchens.

Here was bustle enough even for a little boy from India, but it was a friendly, brisk kind of a bustle. Nobody slapped anybody else when they made a mistake, nor did they cringe and plead if they apologised. When their master was away they lived a luxurious life below stairs, where there was a huge kitchen hung about with shining brass and pewter, and had were four or five abundant meals eaten every day, and a great deal of lively romping went on when Mrs. Medlock was out of the way. They told jokes and laughed as they worked, and seemed to enjoy what they did, and the company they did it in. If Gabriel had seen a little more of India he might not have thought this so strange; but all he had seen of it were the unhappy servants of a tyrannical household, who had been taught from their childhood that they deserved nothing better. But Gabriel had seen neither the better parts of India, nor the sorrier parts of England; and so he found all of it very strange, and thought them all the queerest servants he had ever seen.

Although he did not want to think of the word _lonely_ , he found he liked to be surrounded on all sides by the voices and movement of busyness, and so he set about asking questions, and demanding answers, and getting in the way, and sticking his fingers into every thing, and in every other way making a nuisance of himself.

Some of the servants replied to him with patience, or even with smiles; but here and there one would scowl, or answer shortly, or bid him get himself out of the way. One of them even rapped his fingers for him, and called him a meddlesome brat, and scolded him not to steal the pastry—which Gabriel considered terribly impertinent, as he was one of the masters of the house, and he could hardly steal from himself. This made him still more contrary, and he laughed at them and called them names, and made up teasing rhymes about them, and ran away with their rolling pins and ladles and bowls; and when they became angry he flew into an indignant fury and shouted at them, and kicked at their legs. He even found a dead mouse in a trap in one of the pantries, and dropped it into the bowl which the head cook was stirring when she tried to give him a little cake and tell him to go and play outside; and when this was found out she took him by the ear and marched him to the door of the kitchen and shut it firmly behind him, ignoring his every yell and threat.

There it was that Mary found him, and hustled him back upstairs to his own room, and gave him such a scolding that he began to feel uncomfortably ashamed of himself, though he was not quite sure why he should.

“Th’art in luck,” said Mary at last, shaking her head, “that Cook’s like to think kindly of thee; for if Mrs. Medlock were to hear of this mornin’s work, tha’d be locked up in thy rooms to keep thee out of every body’s way.”

This promise of retribution restored life to Gabriel’s rebellious spirits at once.

“I don’t care,” he cried, and stamped his foot, and tossed his little yellow head. “Let her lock me up! I suppose I shall _die_ in _prison_ , and I shall be eaten by rats and jackals! Then she’ll be sorry. And there’s nothing to do!”

Mary looked at him with something like a smile. “Tha’ should play outside,” she said. “When th’art a little stronger—and I’ll warrant it won’t take long, with thy temper—tha’ could run over to th’ village every day and play with th’ children there. I daresay it’d do thee good.”

“I shan’t like them,” declared Gabriel sulkily. “And besides, it’s raining.”

So it was: though the morning had begun fair, the moor was now more than half hidden in mist and grey cloud, and the world looked dreary and dull.

“What do your boys do, when it’s raining?” he asked suddenly.

“Try to keep from under Mother’s feet mostly,” Mary answered. “Eh! there does seem a lot of people in that little cottage then. Mother has her brother’s lad to see to as well, you know, as was wounded in th’ wars, and his three little ones as well. She’s a good-tempered woman but she gets fair moithered.  My Dean, he doesn’t mind th’ wet. He goes out just th’ same as if th’ sun was shinin’; though he won’t let Sam come too, not since the fever he took last spring. He says he sees things on rainy days as doesn’t show when it’s fair weather. He once found a little fox cub half drowned in its hole and he brought it home to Sam in th’ bosom of his shirt to keep it warm. Its mother had been killed nearby an’ th’ hole was swum out an’ th’ rest o’ th’ litter was dead. Sam’s got it at home now. Dean found a half-drowned young crow another time an’ he brought it home, too, an’ they tamed it. It’s named Soot because it’s so black, an’ it hops an’ flies about with Dean everywhere.”

“Oh,” said Gabriel, feeling rather uncomfortable. He had forgotten to resent Mary’s familiar talk, and had begun to find her stories quite interesting, especially the ones about Dean and Sam and the animals. But now he remembered the big black bird who had sat in the tree above the head of the boy in the garden yesterday, and how it had cawed as if it were laughing at him; and he thought that perhaps the boy had not been a gardener’s son after all. He found himself all at once without anything to say; and he looked down at the floor, and scuffed his foot on the carpet, and felt very sulky.

“Well,” said Mary briskly, “Can tha’ draw?”

“No,” answered Gabriel.

“Can tha’ read?”

“Yes.”

“Then why doesn’t tha’ read somethin’, or learn a bit o’ spellin’?’ Tha’s old enough to be learnin’ thy books a good bit now.”

“I can read _anything_ ,” declared Gabriel scornfully, “only I haven’t any books. Those I had were left in India.”

“That’s a pity,” said Mary. “If Mrs. Medlock’d let thee go into th’ library, there’s thousands o’ books there.”

Gabriel did not ask where the library was, because he was suddenly inspired by a new idea. He made up his mind to go and find it himself. He was not troubled about Mrs. Medlock. Mrs. Medlock seemed always to be out on business, or in her comfortable housekeeper’s sitting-room downstairs. In this queer place one scarcely ever saw any one at all.

He obliged himself to stand at the window for about ten minutes after Mary had gone downstairs, thinking over this new idea, instead of darting out as soon as she was gone. He did not care very much about the library itself, because, though he dearly loved stories, he had very little idea of their coming out of books: all the best stories he knew had been told him, not read, and most of the books he knew were heavy ponderous things with very little to interest any child. But to hear of the library brought back to his mind the hundred rooms with closed doors. He wondered if they were all really locked and what he would find if he could get into any of them. Were there a hundred really? Why shouldn’t he go and see how many doors he could count?

He opened the door of the room and went into the corridor, and then he began his wanderings. It was a long corridor and it branched into other corridors and it led him up short flights of steps which mounted to others again. There were doors and doors, and there were pictures on the walls. Sometimes they were pictures of dark, curious landscapes, but oftenest they were portraits of men and women in queer, grand costumes made of satin and velvet.

Surely no other little boy ever spent such a queer day. It seemed as if there was no one in all the huge rambling house but his own small self, wandering about upstairs and down, through narrow passages and wide ones, where it seemed that no one but himself had ever walked. Since so many rooms had been built, people must have lived in them, but it all seemed so empty that he could not quite believe it true.

He saw so many rooms that he became quite tired and began to think that there must be a hundred, though he had not counted them. In all of them there were old pictures or old tapestries with strange scenes worked on them. There were curious pieces of furniture and curious ornaments in nearly all of them. In one room, which looked like a lady’s sitting-room, the hangings were all embroidered velvet, and in a cabinet were about a hundred little elephants made of ivory. They were of different sizes, and some had their mahouts or palanquins on their backs. Some were much bigger than the others and some were so tiny that they seemed only babies. Gabriel had seen carved ivory in India and he knew all about elephants. He opened the door of the cabinet and stood on a footstool and played that they were five different families of elephant, and they were exploring an enchanted dungeon to find the lost treasure of Richard the Lionheart, hidden there by the wicked Saracen king. When he got tired he set the elephants in order and shut the door of the cabinet.

In all his wanderings through the long corridors and the empty rooms, he had seen nothing alive; but in this room he saw something. Just after he had closed the cabinet door he heard a tiny rustling sound. It made him jump and look around at the sofa by the fireplace, from which it seemed to come. In the corner of the sofa there was a cushion, and in the velvet which covered it there was a hole, and out of the hole peeped a tiny head with a pair of frightened eyes in it.

Gabriel crept softly across the room to look. The bright eyes belonged to a little grey mouse, and the mouse had eaten a hole into the cushion and made a comfortable nest there. Six baby mice were cuddled up asleep near her. If there was no one else alive in the hundred rooms there were seven mice who did not look lonely at all.

Gabriel thought that, if they wouldn’t be frightened, it might be nice to take them back with him; but as he had wandered about long enough to feel tired, he turned back. Two or three times he lost his way by turning down the wrong corridor and was obliged to ramble up and down until he found the right one; but at last he reached his own floor again, though he was some distance from his own room and did not know exactly where he was. When he came to the end of a short passage with tapestry on the wall, he did not know which way to go.

It was while he was standing here that the stillness was broken by a sound. It was another cry, but not quite like the one he had heard last night; it was only a short one, a fretful childish whine muffled by passing through walls.

“It’s nearer than it was,” said Gabriel, his heart beating rather faster. “And it _is_ crying.”

He put his hand accidentally upon the tapestry near him, and then sprang back, feeling quite startled. The tapestry was the covering of a door which fell open and showed him that there was another part of the corridor behind it, and Mrs. Medlock was coming up it with her bunch of keys in her hand and a very cross look on her face.

“What are you doing here?” she said, and she took Gabriel by the arm and pulled him away. “What did I tell you?”

“I turned round the wrong corner,” protested Gabriel. “I didn’t know which way to go and I heard some one crying.”

He quite despised Mrs. Medlock at the moment, but he hated her the next.

“You didn’t hear anything of the sort,” said the housekeeper. “You come along back to your own nursery or I’ll box your ears.”

And she took him by the arm and half pushed, half pulled him up one passage and down another until she pushed him in at the door of his own room.

“Now,” she said, “you stay where you’re told to stay or you’ll find yourself locked up. The master had better get you a school master, same as he said he would. You’re one that needs some one to look sharp after you. I’ve got enough to do.”

She went out of the room and slammed the door after her, and Gabriel flew across the room in a passion and stamped his foot on the hearth-rug, flushed with rage.

“There  _was_  some one crying—there  _was—there was!”_  he said to himself.

 


	5. The key of the garden

On the morning after he went looking for the library, Gabriel did not get out of bed. Instead, he pulled the covers up over his head and stayed there.

Mary wisely said nothing about it, but she talked on cheerfully as she started the fire and set out his breakfast and clothes. Gabriel did not reply. He stayed where he was, curled up in a sorry, sulky little ball under the blankets, until she left on her other duties. Even then he did not move, until three hours later when Mary came back, and laid a book down on a little table near the foot of his bed.

“There’s a book there I thought tha’ might like,” she said. “There’s another child I know as is right fond of it—and it has th’ strangest, prettiest pictures! But there, I daresay it’ll all seem just ordinary to thee, next to that tha’rt used to.”

She had almost done with tidying away the wasted breakfast when Gabriel poked his nose out from under the blankets.

“Why did Mr. Shurley lock up the garden?” he said.

“Art tha’ thinkin’ about that garden yet?” Mary said with a smile. “I knew tha’ would. That was just the way with me when I first heard about it.”

Gabriel sat up in bed. “Did he _hate_ it?” he demanded querulously. “If he loved his wife why did he hate her garden?”

Mary sat down at the little table, without waiting to be asked.

“Mind,” she said, “Mrs. Medlock said it’s not to be talked about. There’s lots o’ things in this place that’s not to be talked over. That’s Mr. Shurley’s orders. His troubles are none servants’ business, he says. But for th’ garden he wouldn’t be like he is. It was Mrs. Shurley’s garden that she had made when first they were married an’ she just loved it, an’ they used to ‘tend the flowers themselves. An’ none o’ th’ gardeners was ever let to go in. Him an’ her used to go in an’ shut th’ door an’ stay there hours an’ hours, readin’ and talkin’. An’ she was just a bit of a girl an’ there was an old tree with a branch bent like a seat on it. An’ she made roses grow over it an’ she used to sit there. But one day when she were sittin’ there th’ branch broke an’ she fell on th’ ground an’ were hurt bad. An’ the next day—well, what with one thing, an’ another, she were very sick for weeks an’ weeks, an’ there were a great deal of bustle and bother about it, an’ at last she died. Th’ doctors thought he’d go out o’ his mind an’ die, too. That’s why he hates it. No one’s never gone in since, an’ he won’t let any one talk about it.”

“Ten years ago,” said Gabriel, learning for the first time what it was to feel sorry for somebody. “Ten years is a very long time to be sad. I was born ten years ago.”

“So tha’ was,” said Mary, and gave him a strange look.

 

 

At first each day which passed by for Gabriel Milton was exactly like the others. Every morning he awoke in his tapestried room and found Mary kneeling upon the hearth building his fire; every morning he ate his breakfast in the nursery which had nothing amusing in it; and after each breakfast he gazed out of the window across to the huge rain-drizzled moor which seemed to spread out on all sides and climb up to the sky.

His meals were served regularly, and Mary waited on him. Mrs. Medlock came and looked at him every day or two, and gave him a shilling on weekends though he had nothing to spend it on, but no one inquired what he did or told him what to do. He supposed that perhaps this was the English way of treating children. In India he had always been attended by his Ayah, who had followed him about and waited on him, hand and foot. He had often been tired of her company. Now he was followed by nobody and was learning to dress himself because Mary looked as though she thought he was silly and stupid when he wanted to have things handed to him and put on.

The rain and the winds kept up for some days, on and off; but Mary said that he should go out all the same, so long as he wrapped up warm. Gabriel thought this a silly idea, and always began the day by reading the stories in the book that she had brought him from the library. It was called _The Thousand and One Nights_ , and had strange and beautiful paintings in it beside the stories. Some of the stories he knew, a little, because they were almost like some of the tales his Ayah had told, but they sounded very different in this book. It made him curious and interested, because he had never thought before of the differences between India and Yorkshire, nor of the differences between each of them and the places in other stories. He began to wonder what Arabia was like, and what birds and gardens they had there.

Gabriel was not the sort of child, however, who could be happy sitting for a long time in one place. Every day after he had read for some time he found that he was looking at the pictures more than the words, and that he stared out of the window more than he looked at either. And after he had stared for a while he realised that if he did not go out he would have to stay in, and do nothing—and so he went out. He did not know that this was the best thing he could have done, and he did not know that, when he began to walk quickly or even run along the paths and down the avenue, he was stirring his slow blood and making himself stronger by fighting with the wind which swept down from the moor. He ran only to make himself warm, and he hated the wind which rushed at his face and roared and held him back as if it were some giant he could not see. But the big breaths of rough fresh air blown over the heather filled his lungs with something which was good for his whole thin body and whipped some red colour into his cheeks and brightened his dull eyes when he did not know anything about it.

After a few days spent like this he wakened one morning knowing what it was to be hungry, and when he sat down to his breakfast he did not glance disdainfully at his porridge and push it away, but took up his spoon and began to eat it and went on eating it until his bowl was empty.

“Tha’ got on well enow with that this mornin’, didn’t tha’?” said Mary.

“It tastes nice today,” said Gabriel, feeling a little surprised himself; and he almost smiled at Mary.

“It’s th’ air of th’ moor that’s’ givin’ thee stomach for tha’ victuals,” answered Mary. “It’s lucky for thee that tha’s got victuals as well as appetite. You go on playin’ you out o’ doors every day an’ you’ll get some flesh on your bones an’ you won’t be so yeller.”

“I don’t play,” said Gabriel. “I have nothing to play with.”

“Nothin’ to play with!” exclaimed Mary. “My boys plays with sticks and stones. They just runs about an’ shouts an’ looks at things.”

“I like your boys,” said Gabriel, frowning. It was a strange idea to him.

“Well,” said Mary stoutly, “I’ve told thee that th’ very birds likes ‘em an’ th’ rabbits an’ wild sheep an’ ponies, an’ th’ foxes themselves. I wonder,” staring at him reflectively, “what Dean would think of thee?”

“He wouldn’t like me,” said Gabriel, looking sullen again. “No one does.”

“How does tha’ like thysel’?” she inquired, really quite as if she were curious to know.

Gabriel hesitated a moment and thought it over.

“Not at all—really,” he answered. “But I never thought of that before.”

 

 

Gabriel did look at things. There was nothing else to do. He walked round and round the gardens and wandered about the paths in the park. He wove together the bare grey twigs that grew in some of the gardens together to make tents or houses, until the gardeners scolded him; then he climbed the apple trees in the orchard and pretended they were castles, with columns and walls of silver streaked with moss-green marble.

Living as if he were all by himself in a house with a hundred mysteriously closed rooms and having nothing whatever to do to amuse himself had set his inactive brain to working and was actually awakening his imagination. Already he felt less “contrary,” though he did not know why. On some days, this sort of game made him very happy, and he told himself stories out loud just as they came into his head, and fought battles with the wind, and hunted dragons and djinns down the long dark yew walk; but on other days, the sound of only his own little voice under the wide grey sky made him feel lonelier than ever.

One place he went to oftener than to any other. It was the long walk outside the gardens with the walls round them. There were bare flowerbeds on either side of it and against the walls ivy grew thickly. There was one part of the wall where the creeping dark green leaves were more bushy than elsewhere. It seemed as if for a long time that part had been neglected. The rest of it had been clipped and made to look neat, but at this lower end of the walk it had not been trimmed at all.

On one of these days Gabriel stopped to notice this and wondered why it was so. He had just paused and was looking up at a long spray of ivy swinging in the wind when he saw a gleam of scarlet and heard a brilliant chirp, and there, on the top of the wall, perched the robin redbreast, tilting forward to look at him with his small head on one side.

“Oh!” Gabriel cried out, “it _is_ you—you came back!” And it did not seem at all queer to him that he spoke to the robin as if he were sure that he would understand and answer.

The robin did answer. He twittered and chirped and hopped along the wall as if he were telling Gabriel all sorts of things, and wanted to play.

Gabriel began to laugh, and as the robin hopped and took little flights along the wall Gabriel ran after him.

“You do remember me after all!” he cried out; and he chirped and tried to whistle, which he did not know how to do in the least. But the robin seemed to be quite satisfied and chirped and whistled back at him. At last he spread his wings and made a darting flight to the top of a tree, where he perched and sang loudly.

That reminded Gabriel of the first time he had seen him. The robin had been swinging on a tree-top then and he had been standing in the orchard. Now he was on the other side of the orchard and standing in the path outside a wall—much lower down—and there was the same tree inside.

“It’s in the garden no one can go into,” he said to himself. “It’s the garden without a door. He lives in there. I wish I could see what it is like!”

He ran up the walk to the green door he had entered the first morning. Then he ran down the path through the other door and then into the orchard, and when he stood and looked up there was the tree on the other side of the wall, and there was the robin just finishing his song and beginning to preen his feathers with his beak.

“It is the garden,” he said. “I am sure it is.”

He climbed up into his favourite apple tree, then into another one much closer to the wall, but he could not climb high enough to see over the wall. He walked round and looked closely at that side of the orchard wall, but he only found what he had found before—that there was no door in it. Then he ran through the kitchen gardens again and out into the walk outside the long ivy-covered wall, and he walked to the end of it and looked at it, but there was no door; and then he walked to the other end, looking again, but there was no door.

“There _must_ be a door,” he said to the robin. “That boy said there is no door, but there must have been one ten years ago, because Mr. Shurley buried the key.”

This gave him so much to think of that he began to be quite interested and feel that he was not sorry that he had come to Misselthwaite Manor. The fact was that the fresh wind from the moor had begun to blow the cobwebs out of his young brain and to waken him up a little.

He went back into the ornamental gardens and ran round and round the fountain flower garden ten times. He counted the times carefully and when he had finished he felt in better spirits. Last week he had only been able to run around it five times at once.

He had begun to like the garden just as he had begun to like the robin and Dean and Sam, and the book with the paintings in it. He was beginning to like Mary, too. That seemed a good many things to like—when you were not used to liking. He went back to his walk outside the long, ivy-covered wall over which he could see the tree-tops; and the second time he walked up and down the most interesting and exciting thing happened to him, and it was all through the robin.

He heard a chirp and a twitter, and when he looked at the bare flower-bed at his left side there the robin was, hopping about and pretending to peck things out of the earth to persuade him that he had not followed Gabriel. But Gabriel knew he had, and the surprise so filled him with delight that he almost shouted out.

“Would you,” he cried: “would you be friends with me?”

The robin chirped, and talked, and coaxed and he hopped, and flirted his tail and twittered. It was as if he were talking. His red waistcoat was like satin and he puffed his tiny breast out and was so fine and so grand and so pretty that it was really as if he were showing Gabriel how important and like a human person a robin could be. Master Gabriel forgot that he had ever been contrary in his life when the robin allowed him to draw closer and closer, and sit down on the verge of the path and talk, and try to make something like robin sounds.

To think that he should actually let Gabriel come as near to him as that! Gabriel was so delighted that he scarcely dared to breathe.

The flower-bed was not quite bare. It was bare of flowers because the perennial plants had been cut down for their winter rest, but there were tall shrubs and low ones which grew together at the back of the bed, and as the robin hopped about under them he saw him hop over a small pile of freshly turned up earth. He stopped on it to look for a worm. The earth had been turned up because a dog had been trying to dig up a mole and he had scratched quite a deep hole.

Gabriel looked at it, not really knowing why the hole was there, and as he looked he saw something almost buried in the newly turned soil. It was something like a ring of rusty iron or brass and when the robin flew up into a tree nearby he put out his hand and picked the ring up. It was more than a ring, however; it was an old key which looked as if it had been buried a long time.

Master Gabriel stood up and looked at it with an almost frightened face as it hung from his finger.

“Perhaps it has been buried for ten years,” he said in a whisper. “Perhaps it is the key to the garden!”


	6. Sam and Dean

He looked at the key quite a long time. He turned it over and over, and thought about it. If it was the key to the closed garden, and he could find out where the door was, he could perhaps open it and see what was inside the walls, and what had happened to the old rose-trees. It seemed as if it must be different from other places and that something strange must have happened to it during ten years. Besides that, if he liked it he could go into it every day and shut the door behind him, and he could make up some play of his own and play it quite alone, because nobody would ever know where he was, but would think the door was still locked and the key buried in the earth. The thought of that pleased him very much.

He put the key in his pocket and walked up and down his walk. No one but himself ever seemed to come there, so he could walk slowly and look at the wall, or, rather, at the ivy growing on it. But howsoever carefully he looked he could see nothing but thickly growing, glossy, dark green leaves. He was very much disappointed. Something of his contrariness came back to him as he paced the walk and looked over it at the tree-tops inside. It seemed so silly, he said to himself, to be near it and not be able to get in. He took the key in his pocket when he went back to the house, and he made up his mind that he would always carry it with him when he went out, so that if he ever should find the hidden door he would be ready.

 

 

Two days after this, when Gabriel opened his eyes he sat upright in bed immediately, and called to Mary. “Look at the moor! Look at the moor!”

The rain had ended and the grey mist and clouds had been swept away in the night by the wind. The wind itself had ceased and a brilliant, deep blue sky arched high over the moorland. Never, never had Gabriel dreamed of a sky so blue. In India skies were hot and blazing; this was of a deep cool blue which almost seemed to sparkle like the waters of some lovely bottomless lake, and here and there, high, high in the arched blueness floated small clouds of snow-white fleece. The far-reaching world of the moor itself looked softly blue instead of gloomy purple-black or awful dreary grey.

“Aye,” said Mary with a cheerful grin. “Th’ storm’s over for a bit. It does like this at this’ time o’ th’ year. It goes off in a night like it was pretendin’ it had never been here an’ never meant to come again. That’s because th’ springtime’s on its way. It’s a long way off yet, but it’s comin’.”

“I thought perhaps it always rained or looked dark in England,” Gabriel said.

“Eh! no!” said Mary, sitting up on her heels among her black lead brushes. “Nowt o’ th’ soart!”

“What does that mean?” asked Gabriel seriously. In India the natives spoke different dialects which only a few people understood, so he was not surprised when Mary used words he did not know.

Mary laughed as she had done the first morning.

“There now,” he said. “I’ve talked broad Yorkshire again. ‘Nowt o’ th’ soart’ means ‘nothin’-of-the-sort,’ ” slowly and carefully, “but it takes so long to say it. Yorkshire’s th’ sunniest place on earth when it is sunny. I told thee tha’d like th’ moor after a bit.”

Gabriel did not want to sit with his book that morning. He was impatient to put on his coat and hat and run outside. The sunshine made the whole place look different. The high, deep, blue sky arched over Misselthwaite as well as over the moor, and he kept lifting his face and looking up into it, trying to imagine what it would be like to lie down on one of the little snow-white clouds and float about.

There was a laurel-hedged walk which curved round the kitchen gardens and ended at a gate which opened into a wood, in the park. He thought he would run up and down this walk a little, and then look into the wood and see if there were any rabbits hopping about. He enjoyed the running very much and when he reached the little gate he opened it and went through because he heard a low, peculiar whistling sound and wanted to find out what it was.

It was a very strange thing indeed. He quite caught his breath as he stopped to look at it.

The funny-looking boy that he had met on his first day in the gardens was lying on a branch of a tree, as easy as if it was a sofa, beaming and looking down at the scene below. Under the tree was sitting a younger boy, with his back against it, playing on a rough wooden pipe. This boy had hair down about his shoulders, and his nose turned up; and they both looked very clean, and both of them had eyes with the same happy brightness, though not of the same colour as each other’s. On the trunk of the tree, a brown squirrel was clinging and watching the younger boy, and from behind a bush nearby a cock pheasant was delicately stretching his neck to peep out, and quite nearby were two rabbits sitting up and sniffing with tremulous noses. And actually it appeared as if the animals were all drawing near to watch, and listen to the strange low little call the pipe seemed to make.

When the boy under the tree saw Gabriel he held up his hand and smiled; but it was the older boy who spoke, so that it almost sounded as if it were the younger boy speaking, only his mouth never moved. His voice was not teasing as it had been before: now it was almost as low as and rather like the piping.

“Don’t tha’ move,” he said. “It’d flight ‘em. A body has to move gentle an’ speak low when wild things is about.”

Gabriel remained motionless. The younger boy stopped playing his pipe and began to rise from the ground. He moved so slowly that it scarcely seemed as though he were moving at all, but at last he stood on his feet and then the squirrel scampered back up into the branches of his tree, the pheasant withdrew his head and the rabbits dropped on all fours and began to hop away, though not at all as if they were frightened. When they were gone, the older boy slipped down out of the tree, and the big black bird that Gabriel had seen before swooped down to perch on his shoulder, which did not seem to startle him at all.

“That’s Sammy, an’ I’m Dean,” the boy said. “I know tha’rt Master Gabriel.”

Gabriel felt that, if he had not already guessed that this was Dean, he must have realised who the two boys were as soon as he had seen them. Who else could have been charming rabbits and pheasants as the natives charm snakes in India? Dean had a soft, curving mouth and his smile spread all over his face. He did not speak to Gabriel as if they had only met once and Gabriel had shouted at him and never learned his name, but as if he knew him quite well. Gabriel spoke to him a little stiffly because he felt rather shy.

“What is that bird?” he asked. It looked even larger when it was so near, and its beak seemed very heavy and sharp.

“This here is Soot. He’s a crow,” said Dean, and grinned his broad grin as if he knew just what Gabriel was thinking. “Tha’ can pet him if tha’ likes—on th’ back, between his wings. Unless tha’d rather not.”

Gabriel felt as though he had very much rather not, but he did not like to say so when Dean’s eyes were twinkling at him in that merry way. He lifted his little chin, and put on his most contrary of expressions, and touched the bird’s back gingerly, careful not to move too fast. The shrewd black eye fixed on him, and the great black beak cocked to one side, but the crow did not seem as though he was about to bite. In fact, he turned his head and nibbled gently at Dean’s ear; and when Dean laughed, Gabriel stroked the black feathers more boldly. They were not so warm as he had expected, but they were much softer.

“Misselthwaite’s done good for thee,” Dean said, looking him up and down. “Tha’s a bit fatter than tha’ was an’ tha’s not quite so yeller. Tha’ looked like a young plucked pigeon when last I saw thee. Thinks I to myself I never set eyes on sadder, sourer face.”

Gabriel wished he could talk as Dean did. His speech was so quick and easy. It sounded as if he liked Gabriel and was not the least afraid Gabriel would not like him, though he was only a common moor boy in patched clothes. There was a clean fresh scent of heather and grass and leaves about him, almost as if he were made of them. Gabriel liked it very much and when he looked into his funny face with the freckled cheeks and round green eyes he forgot that he had felt shy.

“Your mother said that you have a wild pony all of your own,” he said, “and that he understands everything you say to him. Is it true? Do you really?”

Just at that moment Sam came up beside Dean, and poked at his arm, and made a queer gesture with his hands. Gabriel was not quite sure whether he ought to understand something by it, but before he could decide whether to speak Dean asked, “Did tha’ ever ride on an elephant?”

“Lots of times,” said Gabriel at once, with some little exaggeration which we may perhaps pardon him. “Everybody rides on elephants in India. Did _you_ never ride an elephant?”

“Us heard as they had a wild beast show in York last year,” said Dean, with another glance at Sam, whose eyes were shining and whose hands were twisting rapidly into those strange shapes again. “An’ they had an elephant, and lions, and a goat wi’ horns as curled out as long as a man’s arm, and five different kinds o’ monkeys. Old Crossley brought us a pamphlet about ‘em, with pictures. Is elephants so graidely big as all that?”

“As tall as that branch there,” said Gabriel importantly, pointing a little higher than was quite true, “but they have very small golden eyes, and they always seem to be looking at you and thinking important things. The natives dress them in purple and silver, and make them go where they like by prodding them with sharp goads. And they walk ever so slowly, and they kick up ever so much dust in the road in the dry season and turn everything to mud in the wet. And their backs are so wide that you can hardly tell you’re sitting on a living animal at all, except for the smell. I should much rather ride a horse. It must be ever so much more exciting.”

He said a little more than he meant to, because he wanted to hear Sam speak too. The little boy seemed delighted at everything he said, but though he opened and closed his mouth and beamed, and though his eyes were wide as saucers, he never said a word. Gabriel thought that he must be shy, and so he talked to him more than he did to Dean, though he liked Dean’s voice very much.

Sam said nothing, however; and Dean chuckled his merry little laugh. “Sammy says, why does they prick at th’ elephants to make ‘em do as they like? Doesn’t it make ‘em angry?”

“I don’t know,” said Gabriel, “I never thought of that. But he didn’t say anything at all.”

“He said it wi’ his hands,” explained Dean. “Sammy canna talk.”

“Oh,” said Gabriel. “Is he simple?”

“Simple? Nowt o’ th’ soart! He can read clever books better than most folks does at four time his age. It’s only his voice as doesna’ work.”

Sam screwed up his little face into a strange silent laugh, and his brother ruffled his long hair until Sam pushed him away with a good-natured roughness.

“How does he say what he wants, then?”

“I says it for him,” said Dean frankly. “I showed him how to read and how to write, but the slate’s heavy an’ he canna be carryin’ it everywhere. Most folks about here, they knows him well enough to get by.”

This did not seem at all strange to Gabriel. There were people in India who could not walk, or could not hear or see, and there were many people who could not read; and as a boy who could not speak seemed much less remarkable than a boy who could charm animals, he thought no more about it.

Sam stopped and turned his head quickly, his rosy-cheeked face lighting up. A chirp had come from a thick holly bush, bright with scarlet berries, and Gabriel thought he knew whose it was.

“Is that the robin?Is he really calling us?” he asked.

“Aye,” said Dean, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, “he’s callin’ some one he’s friends with. That’s same as sayin’ ‘Here I am. Look at me. I wants a bit of a chat.’ There he is in the bush.”

“I think he followed me here,” said Gabriel. “I think he knows me a little.”

Sam chuckled silently and nodded, and said something with his hands.

“Aye, he knows thee,” said Dean in his low voice again. “An’ he likes thee. He’s took thee on. He’ll tell Sam all about thee in a minute.”

Sam moved quite close to the bush with the slow movement Gabriel had noticed before, and then he made a sound almost like the robin’s own twitter. The robin listened a few seconds, intently, and then answered quite as if he were replying to a question.

“Aye, he’s a friend o’ yours,” chuckled Dean.

“Do you think he is?” cried Gabriel eagerly. He did so want to know. “Do you think he really likes me?”

“He wouldn’t come near thee if he didn’t,” answered Dean. “Birds is rare choosers an’ a robin can flout a body worse than a man. See, he’s making up to thee now. ‘Cannot tha’ see a chap?’ he’s sayin’.”

And it really seemed as if it must be true. He so sidled and twittered and tilted as he hopped on his bush.

“Do you understand everything birds say?” said Gabriel to Sam.

Sam’s grin spread until he seemed bright as the sun, and his hands flew so fast that Gabriel could hardly see the shapes they made.

“He thinks he does, and they think he does,” Dean said for him. “He’s lived on th’ moor with ‘em so long. He’s both watched ‘em break shell an’ come out an’ fledge an’ learn to fly an’ begin to sing, till it seems like he’s one of ‘em.”

The three boys passed all of that morning together in talking and laughing and running, and in introducing Gabriel to the pony who grazed on the moor just outside the gardens and who came trotting up when Sam whistled, and in trying how well they could walk on their hands, and in tumbling about and looking at growing things and birds and beetles. Gabriel told them about riding on elephants and camels, and about the officers going to hunt tigers. Dean told him the names of flowers and bushes, even those ones that were bare and drab and all looked like twigs because the spring had not woken them up yet.Some of them had names that Gabriel had heard of before, though he did not know what they looked like, and others were quite new to him. He learned how to name them with his hands too, as Sam did, because he rather liked Sam and in India a native was always pleased if you knew his speech. Dean laughed at Gabriel when he was clumsy about it, though not at all as if he thought Gabriel was stupid. It felt like a friendly kind of laughing, as if they were all playing a game together. Before long Gabriel was laughing too, though he had never laughed at himself before.

It was a curious thing, to watch Sam and Dean together. Dean would speak for Sam sometimes without even looking at him to see what his hands were saying, or would turn one simple sign and a look into a long breathless tumble of a speech, until sometimes Gabriel was not quite sure whether the words he spoke were meant to be Sam’s, or Dean’s, or whether they belonged to both of them at once. They moved, too, in the same way, and sometimes at the same time, as if they were one boy in two bodies. But they were not the same in all things. Dean liked to preen and strut, rather like the robin himself, and he looked at Sam as if there were nothing in the world so important. He teased and indulged his little brother by turns, and he said nothing seriously if he could help it. Sam was slower and softer in his movements than Dean.He was quicker both to delight and to impatience, and as earnest and whole-hearted in every feeling as a puppy. But it was always he who decided where they ought to go next and what they ought to do, and sometimes he wandered away and seemed to forget about the other two boys altogether for a time. And there seemed to be something of enchantment in his eyes, as if he saw more in the world than anybody else, like the fakirs in India; only it seemed like the sort of magic that delighted and amazed him all the time, while Dean looked and spoke as if all this was perfectly simple and natural that animals should talk to him, and nothing remarkable at all.

Gabriel was startled and sorry when he heard the big clock in the courtyard strike the hour of his midday dinner.

“I shall have to go,” he said mournfully. “And you will have to go too, won’t you?”

Sam grinned, and picked up his coat from the grass. He brought out of his pocket a lumpy little bundle tied up in a quite clean, coarse, blue and white handkerchief. It held two thick pieces of bread with a slice of something laid between them.

“Our dinner’s easy to carry about with us,” Dean said, digging about in his own pockets, which seemed full of all sorts of other interesting things. “It’s oftenest naught but bread, but Sam, he’s got a fine slice o’ fat bacon with it today.”

Gabriel could scarcely bear to leave them. Suddenly it seemed as if they might belong to some sort of fairy world, and it might be gone when he came into the gardens again. They seemed too good to be true.


	7. The robin who showed the way

He found Sam and Dean again after dinner, however, and he stayed out of doors nearly all day. When he sat down to his supper at night he felt hungry and drowsy and comfortable.

“Listen to th’ wind wutherin’ round the house,” Mary said. “You could bare stand up on the moor if you was out on it tonight.”

Gabriel did not know what “wutherin’” meant until he listened, and then he understood. It must mean that hollow shuddering sort of roar which rushed round and round the house as if the giant no one could see were buffeting it and beating at the walls and windows to try to break in. But one knew he could not get in, and somehow it made one feel very safe and warm inside a room with a red coal fire.

“I met Dean and Sam today,” he told her.

“There,” said she, “I’d thought tha’ might. They come by th’ servants’ hall at dinner o’ purpose to see me. I was right glad o’ it, for it’s not my night off ‘til Thursday. How does tha’ like ‘em?”

“I think—I think they’re perfect!” said Gabriel in a determined voice.

Mary looked rather taken aback but she looked pleased, too.

“Well,” she said, “us always thought they’s the best lads as ever was born, but most folks finds ‘em a mite queer until they gets to know ‘em.”

“I like their queerness,” said Gabriel firmly, and then he laughed. “I like the way they talk. It makes it easy to say all sorts of things you never thought about before.”

Martha beamed with satisfaction.

“I’m glad tha’ likes ‘em. I shouldn’t be surprised but they’ll be about a good deal more now th’ weather’s began to turn.”

Gabriel sat and pondered for a moment, then he thought he might ask her a question.

“Mary,” he said, in his earnest little way, “why is it that Sam had bacon in his dinner and not Dean, though Dean is bigger than Sam?”

“That’s just the way it is, between th’ two of ‘em,” she answered. “If there’s not much to be had, Dean always takes care that Sam has most of it.”

This made Gabriel very thoughtful, and he did not ask any more questions. He looked at the red fire and listened to the wind wuthering. It seemed to be wuthering louder than ever.

But as he was listening to the wind he began to listen to something else. He did not know what it was, because at first he could scarcely distinguish it from the wind itself. It was a curious sound—it seemed almost as if a child were crying somewhere. Sometimes the wind sounded rather like a child crying, but presently Master Gabriel felt quite sure this sound was inside the house, not outside it. It was far away, but it was inside. He thought it sounded like the crying he had heard once before. He turned round and looked at Mary.

“Do you hear any one crying?” he said.

Mary suddenly looked confused.

“No,” he answered. “It’s th’ wind. Sometimes it sounds like as if some one was lost on th’ moor an’ wailin’. It’s got all sorts o’ sounds.”

“But listen,” said Gabriel. “It’s in the house—down one of those long corridors.”

And at that very moment a door must have been opened somewhere downstairs; for a great rushing draft blew along the passage and the door of the room they sat in was blown open with a crash, and as they both jumped to their feet the light was blown out and the crying sound was swept down the far corridor so that it was to be heard more plainly than ever.

“There!” cried Gabriel in triumph. “I told you so! It is some one crying—and it isn’t a grown-up person.”

Mary went and shut the door and turned the key, but before she did it they both heard the sound of a door in some far passage shutting with a bang, and then everything was quiet, for even the wind ceased wuthering for a few moments.

“It was th’ wind,” said Mary firmly. “An’ if it wasn’t, it was little Betty Butterworth, th’ scullery-maid. She’s had th’ toothache all day.”

But something troubled in her manner made Master Gabriel stare very hard at her. He did not believe she was speaking the truth.

 

 

On the next day, Sam and Dean did not come; and though Gabriel was disappointed, he was in too good spirits to be unhappy. He ran and skipped and climbed about all the gardens and the orchard, and looked at all the plants and tried to remember their names. At length he went to his own special walk and made up his mind to try if he could walk it on his hands. It was a good long walk and he took several tumbles, but before he had gone half-way down the path he was so bruised and breathless that he was obliged to stop. He did not mind much, because he had come so much farther than he had managed yesterday. He stopped with a little laugh of pleasure, and there, lo and behold, was the robin swaying on a long branch of ivy. He had followed Gabriel, and he greeted him with a chirp. As Gabriel had walked on his hands the heavy key had fallen out of his pocket once or twice, and when he saw the robin he laughed again.

“You showed me where the key was before,” he said. “You ought to show me the door today; but I don’t believe you know! ”

The robin flew from his swinging spray of ivy on to the top of the wall and he opened his beak and sang a loud, lovely trill, merely to show off. Nothing in the world is quite as adorably lovely as a robin when he shows off—and they are nearly always doing it.

Gabriel Milton had heard a great deal about magic in his Ayah’s stories, and he always said that what happened almost at that moment was magic.

One of the nice little gusts of wind rushed down the walk, and it was a stronger one than the rest. It was strong enough to wave the branches of the trees, and it was more than strong enough to sway the trailing sprays of untrimmed ivy hanging from the wall. Gabriel had stepped close to the robin, and suddenly the gust of wind swung aside some loose ivy trails, and more suddenly still he jumped toward it and caught it in his hand. This he did because he had seen something under it—a round knob which had been covered by the leaves hanging over it. It was the knob of a door.

He put his hands under the leaves and began to pull and push them aside. Thick as the ivy hung, it nearly all was a loose and swinging curtain, though some had crept over wood and iron. Gabriel’s heart began to thump and his hands to shake a little in his delight and excitement. The robin kept singing and twittering away and tilting his head on one side, as if he were as excited as Gabriel was. What was this under his hands which was square and made of iron and which his fingers found a hole in?

It was the lock of the door which had been closed ten years and he put his hand in his pocket, drew out the key and found it fitted the keyhole. He put the key in and turned it. It took two hands to do it, but it did turn.

And then he took a long breath and looked behind him up the long walk to see if any one was coming. No one was coming. No one ever did come, it seemed, and he took another long breath, because he could not help it, and he held back the swinging curtain of ivy and pushed back the door which opened slowly—slowly.

Then he slipped through it, and shut it behind him, and stood with his back against it, looking about him and breathing quite fast with excitement, and wonder, and delight.

He was standing inside the secret garden.


	8. "It isn't quite a dead garden!"

It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine.

The high walls were covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses which were so thick that they were matted together. All the ground was covered with grass of a wintry brown and out of it grew clumps of bushes which were surely rose-bushes if they were alive. There were numbers of standard roses which had so spread their branches that they were like little trees. There were other trees in the garden, and one of the things which made the place look strangest and loveliest was that climbing roses had run all over them and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying curtains, and here and there they had caught at each other or at a far-reaching branch and had crept from one tree to another and made lovely bridges of themselves. There were neither leaves nor roses on them now and Gabriel did not know whether they were dead or alive, but their thin grey or brown branches and sprays looked like a sort of hazy mantle spreading over everything, walls, and trees, and even brown grass, where they had fallen from their fastenings and run along the ground. It was this hazy tangle from tree to tree which made it all look so mysterious.

It was all so very still that Gabriel almost wanted to shout, and jump up and down, and break the silence; but there was something breathless and quiet about the place that made him stop and think, and realise that he didn’t really want to do anything of the kind after all.

He waited a moment and listened at the stillness. The robin, who had flown to his treetop, was still as all the rest. He did not even flutter his wings; he sat without stirring, and looked at Gabriel.

“No wonder it is still,” he whispered to the robin. “I am the first person who has spoken in here for ten years.”

He moved away from the door, stepping as softly as if he were afraid of awakening some one. He was glad that there was grass under his feet and that his steps made no sounds. He walked under one of the fairy-like grey arches between the trees and looked up at the sprays and tendrils which formed them.

“Is it all a quite dead garden, I wonder?” he said to himself. “I wish it wasn’t.”

If he had been Dean, who knew everything about animals and growing things, he might perhaps have known whether the wood was alive by looking at it. But he could only see that there were only grey or brown sprays and branches and none showed any signs of even a tiny leaf-bud anywhere.

He was inside the wonderful garden, and he could come through the door under the ivy any time. He felt as if he had found a world all his own.

The sun was shining inside the four walls and the high arch of blue sky over this particular piece of Misselthwaite seemed even more brilliant and soft than it was over the moor. The robin flew down from his tree-top and hopped about or flew after Gabriel from one bush to another. He chirped a good deal and had a very busy air, as if he were showing him things. Everything was strange and silent and they seemed to be hundreds of miles away from any one, but somehow Gabriel did not feel lonely at all.

He walked around the whole garden, hopping and leaping and dancing a little here and there for the quiet secret happiness of it all, stopping when he wanted to look at things. There seemed to have been grass paths here and there, and in one or two corners there were alcoves of evergreen with stone seats or tall moss-covered flower urns in them.

As Gabriel came near the second of these alcoves he stopped. There had once been a flowerbed in it, and he thought he saw something sticking out of the black earth—some sharp little pale green points, as if something might be moving and stirring under the ground.

He was not quite sure what they were, but he rather liked them. They looked ever so much more alive than the tangled grey bones of the roses, and he thought that perhaps there might be others coming up in other places.

This time as he went around the garden he did not hop or jump, but walked, and kept his eyes on the ground. He looked in the old border beds and among the grass, and after he had gone round, trying to miss nothing, he had found ever so many more sharp, pale green points, and he had become quite excited again.

“It isn’t a quite dead garden,” he cried out softly to himself. “Even if the roses are dead, there are other things alive.”

Gabriel did not know anything about gardening, but the grass seemed so thick in some of the places where the green points were pushing their way through that he thought they did not seem to have room enough to grow. He searched about until he found a rather sharp piece of wood and knelt down and dug and weeded out the weeds and grass until he made nice little clear places around them.

“Now they look as if they could breathe,” he said, after he had finished with the first ones. “I am going to do ever so many more. I’ll do all I can see. If I haven’t time today I can come tomorrow.”

He went from place to place, and dug and weeded, and enjoyed himself so immensely that he was led on from bed to bed and into the grass under the trees. The exercise made him so warm that he first threw his coat off, and then his hat, and without knowing it he was smiling down on to the grass and the pale green points all the time.

Master Gabriel worked in his garden until it was time to go to his midday dinner. In fact, he was rather late in remembering, and when he put on his coat and hat he could not believe that he had been working two or three hours. He had been actually happy all the time; and dozens and dozens of the tiny, pale green points were to be seen in cleared places, looking twice as cheerful as they had looked before when the grass and weeds had been smothering them.

“I shall come back this afternoon,” he said, looking all round at his new kingdom, and speaking to the trees and the rose-bushes as if they heard him.

Then he ran lightly across the grass, pushed open the slow old door and slipped through it under the ivy. He had such red cheeks and such bright eyes and ate such a dinner that Mary was delighted.

In the course of his digging with his pointed stick Gabriel had found himself often digging up a sort of white root rather like an onion. Some of them had the beginnings of a green spike creeping up out of the top. Each time he had put it back in its place and patted the earth carefully down on it and just now he wondered if Mary could tell him what they were.

“Mary,” said Gabriel, “what are those green spikes that stick up out of the earth? And those white roots that look like onions?”

“They’re bulbs,” answered Mary. “Lots o’ spring flowers grow from ‘em. Th’ very little ones are snowdrops an’ crocuses an’ th’ big ones are narcissuses an’ jonquils and daffydowndillys. Th’ biggest of all is lilies an’ purple flags. Eh! they are nice. Dean’s got a whole lot of ‘em planted in our bit o’ garden.”

“Does Dean know all about them?” asked Gabriel, a new idea taking possession of him.

“Our Dean can make a flower grow out of a brick walk. It’s almost as if he whispers things out o’ th’ ground.”

“Do bulbs live a long time? Would they live years and years if no one helped them?” inquired Gabriel curiously.

“They’s things as helps themselves,” said Mary. “That’s why poor folk can afford to have ‘em. If you don’t trouble ‘em, most of ‘em’ll work away underground for a lifetime an’ spread out an’ have little ‘uns. There’s a place in th’ park woods here where there’s snowdrops by thousands. They’s the prettiest sight in Yorkshire when th’ spring comes. No one knows when they was first planted.”

“I wish the spring was here now,” said Gabriel. “I want to see all the things that grow in England.”

He had finished his dinner and gone to his favourite seat on the hearth-rug.

“I wish—I wish I had a little spade,” he said.

“Whatever does tha’ want a spade for?” asked Mary, laughing. “Art tha’ goin’ to take to diggin’?”

Gabriel looked at the fire and pondered a little. He must be careful if he meant to keep his secret kingdom. He wasn’t doing any harm, but if Mr. Shurley found out about the open door he would be fearfully angry and get a new key and lock it up forevermore.

“This is such a big lonely place,” he said slowly. “The house is lonely, and the park is lonely, and the gardens are lonely. So many places seem shut up. I thought if I had a little spade I could dig somewhere as the gardeners do, and I might make a little garden if I could get some seeds.”

Mary’s face went quite warm.

“There now!” she exclaimed, “that’s one of the best things tha’ could do, I’ll warrant. Even if tha’ doesn’t plant nothin’ but parsley an’ radishes, tha’d dig an’ rake away an’ be right down happy over it.”

“How much would a spade cost—a little one?” Gabriel asked.

“Well,” was Mary’s reflective answer, “at Thwaite village there’s a shop or so an’ I saw little garden sets with a spade an’ a rake an’ a fork all tied together for two shillings. An’ they was stout enough to work with, too.”

“I’ve got more than that in my purse,” said Gabriel. “Mrs. Medlock gives me money a shilling every week from Mr. Shurley.”

“Did he remember thee that much?” exclaimed Mary. “My word! that’s riches. Th’ rent of our cottage is only one an’ threepence an’ it’s like pullin’ eye-teeth to get it. Now, if tha gave the money to Dean, and told him what tha’ wants, he’d go an’ buy th’ garden tools an’ th’ seeds at th’ same time. In the shop at Thwaite they sell packages o’ flower-seeds for a penny each, and our Dean he knows which is th’ prettiest ones an’ how to make ‘em grow. He walks over to Thwaite many a day just’ for th’ fun of it.”

 

 

The sun shone down for nearly a week on the secret garden. The Secret Garden was what Gabriel called it when he was thinking of it. He liked the name, and he liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut him in no one knew where he was.

Gabriel was an odd, determined little person, and now he had something interesting to be determined about, he was very much absorbed, indeed. Whenever Sam and Dean weren’t at Misselthwaite he worked and dug and pulled up weeds steadily, only becoming more pleased with his work every hour instead of tiring of it. It seemed to him like a fascinating sort of play. He found many more of the sprouting pale green points than he had ever hoped to find. There were so many that he remembered what Mary had said about the “snowdrops by the thousands,” and about bulbs spreading and making new ones. These had been left to themselves for ten years and perhaps they had spread, like the snowdrops, into thousands. He wondered how long it would be before they showed that they were flowers.

The bulbs in the secret garden must have been much astonished. Such nice clear places were made round them that they had all the breathing space they wanted, and really, if Master Gabriel had known it, they began to cheer up under the dark earth and work tremendously. The sun could get at them and warm them, and when the rain came down it could reach them at once, so they began to feel very much alive.


	9. The nest of the missel thrush

“Springtime’s comin’,” Dean said one morning. “Cannot tha’ smell it?”

Gabriel sniffed and thought he could.

“I smell something nice and fresh and damp,” he said.

“That’s th’ good rich earth,” Dean said, as he took a clumsy little brown paper package out of his coat pocket. He untied the string and inside there were ever so many neater and smaller packages with a picture of a flower on each one. “It’s in a good humour makin’ ready to grow things. It’s dull in th’ winter when it’s got nowt to do, but it’s right glad when plantin’ time comes, an’ the birds starts to sing and scratch about, an’ the sun warms it, an’ things start at stirrin’ down below in the dark.”

“Everything is hot, and wet, and green after the rains in India,” said Gabriel, because Sam’s eyes had turned to him with a bright, inquisitive look that he was coming to know very well. “And I think things grow up in a night.”

“These won’t grow up in a night,” said Dean. “Tha’ll have to wait for ‘em. They’ll poke up a bit higher here, an’ push out a spike more there, an’ uncurl a leaf this day an’ another that. You watch ‘em.”

“I am going to,” answered Gabriel, and they all sat down on the ground to look at the things Dean had brought.

“Us’s got th’ garden tools. There’s a little spade an’ rake an’ a fork an’ hoe. They are good ‘uns. There’s a trowel, too.”

Sam pointed at two of the packets and beamed with pride.Dean laughed. “An’ th’ woman in th’ shop threw in a packet o’ white poppy an’ one o’ blue larkspur when I bought th’ other seeds, because this ‘un was peepin’ up at her so hopeful-like that she thought as they mun be for him.”

“Thank you,” said Gabriel to Sam, rather formal and grave. “Will you show the seeds to me?”

“There’s a lot o’ mignonette an’ poppies. Mignonette’s th’ sweetest smellin’ thing as grows, an’ it’ll grow wherever you cast it, same as poppies will. Them as’ll come up an’ bloom if you just whistle to ‘em, them’s th’ nicest of all. See here,” he said suddenly, lifting his bright green eyes to look at Gabriel. “I’ll plant them for thee myself. Where is tha’ garden?”

Gabriel’s thin hands clenched at the grass. He had thought of this, but he did not know what to say, so for a whole minute he said nothing. And he felt as if he went red and then pale.

“Tha’s got a bit o’ garden, hasn’t tha’?” Dean said.

Sam’s eyes went wide, and he scribbled for a moment with the pencil stub and old envelope that Gabriel had brought with him out of the house. _Wouldn’t they give you a bit? Hasn’t you got any yet?_

Gabriel looked back and forth between them and leaned in, looking very earnest and important.

“Could you keep a secret, if I told you one? It’s a great secret. I don’t know what I should do if any one found it out. I believe I should die!” He said the last sentence quite fiercely.

Sam nodded at once, quite as earnest as Gabriel. Dean looked rather puzzled and rubbed his hand over his rough head, but he answered in his usual practical way.

“Us is keepin’ secrets all th’ time,” he said. “If us couldn’t keep secrets from th’ other lads, secrets about foxes’ cubs, an’ birds’ nests, an’ wild things’ holes, there’d be naught safe on th’ moor. Aye, we can keep secrets.”

Master Gabriel did not mean to put out his hand and clutch Sam’s arm, but he did it.

“I’ve stolen a garden,” he said very fast. “It isn’t mine. It isn’t anybody’s. Nobody wants it, nobody cares for it, nobody ever goes into it. Perhaps everything is dead in it already; I don’t know. I don’t care! Nobody has any right to take it from me when I care about it and they don’t. They’re letting it die, all shut in by itself,” he ended passionately, and he balled up his little fists and looked back and forth between the two of them, red in the face and breathing very hard. He felt as though he might cry, but not the kind of crying he used in his tantrums: something hotter and heavier, that seemed to scratch at his throat.

Sam’s curious colourful eyes grew rounder and rounder.

“Eh-h-h!” Dean said, drawing his exclamation out slowly.

Gabriel leaped to his feet. “I’ve nothing to do,” said he hotly. “Nothing belongs to me. I found it myself and I got into it myself. I was only just like the robin, and they wouldn’t take it from the robin.”

Then Sam did something very unexpected. He climbed to his feet, and wrapped his arms around Gabriel’s waist as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and buried his face in Gabriel’s chest, and held him. If anybody had ever hugged Master Gabriel Milton before, he did not remember it; and that it should come so suddenly and so wholeheartedly from this queer, earnest little boy whom the foxes and the skylarks loved gave Gabriel a very strange feeling in his chest. The tears that wanted to come were suddenly a very different kind of tear, and he was not quite sure what he ought to do. Before he could decide Sam had let go, and was looking up at him with eager sympathy.

Sam pointed to his eyes, then to himself and Dean, and seemed to look at Gabriel expectantly. Gabriel knew that Sam was asking if he and Dean might see the garden. He knew he felt contrary again, and obstinate, and he did not care at all. He was imperious and Indian, and at the same time hot and sorrowful.

“Come with me and I’ll show you,” he said.

He led them round the laurel path and to the walk where the ivy grew so thickly. The two boys followed him. Dean wore a queer, almost pitying, look on his face, and looked about a great deal to see if any grown-ups were nearby. Sam kept close by Gabriel’s side, and looked very much as if he were being led to look at some strange bird’s nest and must move softly. When Gabriel stepped to the wall and lifted the hanging ivy Sam started. There was a door and Gabriel pushed it slowly open and Sam slipped in eagerly under Gabriel’s arm, and the other two passed in together, and then Gabriel stood and waved his hand around defiantly.

“It’s this,” he said. “It’s a secret garden, and I’m the only one in the world who wants it to be alive.”

 

 

Sam stood with his mouth open and his eyes shining in silent delight, while his brother looked round and round about himself, and round and round again.

“Eh!” Dean almost whispered, “it is a queer, solemn place! It’s like as if a body was in a dream.”

For two or three minutes he stood looking round him, while Gabriel watched him, and then he began to walk about softly, even more lightly than Gabriel had walked the first time he had found herself inside the four walls. His eyes seemed to be taking in everything—the grey trees with the grey creepers climbing over them and hanging from their branches, the tangle on the walls and among the grass, the evergreen alcoves with the stone seats and tall flower urns standing in them.

“I never thought I’d see this place,” he said at last.

He had spoken aloud and Gabriel made a clumsy sign to him, the same one that they used when a wild animal was a little shy and would bolt if it heard voices.

“Don’t talk aloud,” he said in a whisper, “don’t—I couldn’t bear it if anybody heard us and tried to find out what we’re doing here.”

Dean pulled a face and covered his mouth with one hand, as if to say that he would be quiet.

“Did you know about the garden?” Gabriel asked softly.

Dean nodded.

“Mother told me there was one as no one ever went inside,” he murmured, saying the same thing with his hands. “Us used to wonder what it was like.”

Sam, who had bounded a little way ahead of them, turned around and looked up with delight at the lovely grey tangle overhead. His hands flew too fast for Gabriel to follow.

“He says as how, come springtime, this will be so full o’ nests, there’ll be such twitterin’ and chirpin’ and flutterin’,” whispered Dean. “It’d be th’ safest nestin’ place in England. No one never comin’ near’ an’ tangles o’ trees an’ roses to build in. I wonder all th’ birds on th’ moor don’t build here.”

“Oh!” whispered Gabriel, and caught at his arm again. “Will there be roses? Can you tell? I thought perhaps they were all dead.”

“Eh! Canna’ tha tell that?” Dean laughed. “Not them—not all of ‘em! Look here!”

He ran over to the nearest tree—an old, old one with grey lichen all over its bark, but upholding a curtain of tangled sprays and branches. He took a thick knife out of his pocket and opened one of its blades.

“There’s lots o’ dead wood as ought to be cut out,” he said. “An’ there’s a lot o’ old wood, but it made some new last year. This here’s a new bit,” and he touched a shoot which looked brownish green instead of hard, dry grey.

Gabriel touched it himself in an eager way.

“That one?” he said. “Is that one quite alive—quite?”

Dean curved his happy, teasing mouth.

“It’s as wick as you or me,” he said; and Gabriel remembered that Mary had told him that “wick” meant “alive” or “lively.”

“I’m glad it’s wick!” he cried out in his whisper. “I want them all to be wick. You must come around the garden with me count how many wick ones there are.”

They went from tree to tree and from bush to bush.

“They’ve run wild,” Dean said, “but th’ strongest ones has fair thrived on it. The delicatest ones has died out, but th’ others has growed an’ growed, an’ spread an’ spread, till they’s a wonder. See here!” and he pulled down a thick grey, dry-looking branch. “A body might think this was dead wood, but I don’t believe it is—down to th’ root. I’ll cut it low down an’ see.”

He knelt and with his knife cut the lifeless-looking branch through, not far above the earth.

“There!” he said exultantly. “I told thee so. There’s green in that wood yet. Look at it.”

Gabriel was down on his knees before he spoke, gazing with all his might.

“When it looks a bit greenish an’ juicy like that, it’s wick,” Dean explained. “When th’ inside is dry an’ breaks easy, like this here piece I’ve cut off, it’s done for. There’s a big root here as all this live wood sprung out of, an’ if th’ old wood’s cut off an’ it’s dug round, and took care of there’ll be—” he stopped and lifted his face to look up at the climbing and hanging sprays above him—“there’ll be a fountain o’ roses here this summer.”

They kept at their work for an hour or more, cutting away the dead wood while Sam played and explored and found the hiding places of little animals. The spade, and hoe, and fork were very useful. Dean showed Gabriel how to use the fork while he dug about roots with the spade and stirred the earth and let the air in.

“There’s a lot o’ work to do here!” Dean said once, looking about quite exultantly.

“Will you come again and help me to do it?” Gabriel asked. He said it rather stiffly, as he was not yet accustomed to asking people for things instead of demanding them.

“Us’ll come every day if tha’ wants us, rain or shine,” Dean answered stoutly. “It’s the best fun I ever had in my life—shut in here an’ wakenin’ up a garden.”

Sam, who was sitting on a little stone step nearby and talking to the robin, looked up at this; then he wrote, _Don’t you make it like a gardener’s garden, all clipped & spick & span & tidy. It’s nicer like this with things running wild & swinging and catching hold of each other._

“No,” said Gabriel. “It wouldn’t seem like a secret garden if it was tidy.”

Dean laughed. “Th’ pair o’ you couldn’t keep a square lawn tidy if they paid you for it. You’d have it all a tangle in a month, with flowers everywhere, an’ such lots o’ friendly wild things runnin’ about makin’ homes for themselves, or buildin’ nests an’ singin’ an’ whistlin’.”

Sam laughed his silent little laugh, but Gabriel did not. A thought had struck him; and when Dean had run over to another tree around the next corner, he told it to Sam.

“Do you know,” he said, “you are as nice as your mother said you were. I like you, and you make the third and fourth people. I never thought I should like four people.”

Sam looked at him and laughed again. He did look funny and delightful, Gabriel thought, with his round bright eyes and red cheeks and happy looking turned-up nose. He held up four fingers—pointed to himself and Dean for two, and put those two fingers down—then he pointed to the other two, and looked a question at Gabriel.

“Your mother, and the robin,” said Gabriel, leaning forward to touch each of the two remaining fingers in turn.

Sam laughed so that he kicked his heels against the stone, and the robin hopped up onto a twig close by his head and twittered inquisitively.

 _You’rt the strangest lad I ever met_ , Sam wrote; and Gabriel laughed himself, so that he had to cover his mouth with his fist to keep quiet.

Then Gabriel did a strange thing. He leaned forward and asked Sam a question he had never dreamed of asking any one before, and he tried to ask it in Yorkshire.

“Does tha’ like me?” he said.

Sam nodded at once, with his bright happy eyes. Then he pointed to the robin, and nodded; and he pointed after Dean, and nodded, and held up three fingers.

“That’s three, then,” cried Gabriel, and he could not stop himself from smiling. “That’s three for me!”

When they heard the dinner bell, Gabriel did something that he had been thinking of for some days, although he was not used to thinking of other people and what they might want. He asked them both to come inside with him to his nursery, to share his dinner with him, and to see their mother. Sam leaped up at once in delight; but Dean shook his head.

“Sammy here, he’d be at home in Buckin’ham Palace or at the bottom of a coal mine,” he said, taking out his dinner from his pockets and settling down under a tree, “but fancy rooms and high ceilin’s isn’t for me. I’ll be here when you runs back on outside, sure as anythin’.”

Sam and Gabriel caught up their coats, and Sam gave his own dinner to a reluctant Dean while Gabriel found his hat. They were half-way to the door in the wall when Gabriel stopped and turned back, and looked between the two of them.

“Whatever happens, you—you never would tell?” he said.

Dean’s freckled cheeks were distended with his first big bite of bread and bacon, but he managed to smile encouragingly.

“If tha’ was a missel thrush an’ showed us where thy nest was, does tha’ think us’d tell any one? Not us,” he said. “Tha’ art as safe as a missel thrush.”

And Gabriel was quite sure he was.


	10. "Might I have a bit of earth?"

They ran so fast that Gabriel was rather out of breath when he reached his room. His hair was ruffled on his forehead and his cheeks were bright pink. His dinner was waiting on the table, and Mary was waiting near it. Sam ran to her at once and threw his arms around her with a laugh.

“Eh now!” she said, though she seemed pleased, and hugged and kissed him warmly, “what’s tha’ doin’ in here, tha’ young varmint? Has tha’ been botherin’ Master Gabriel with wantin’ to see inside th’ house, or look at th’ books in th’ library?”

“He is my guest,” said Gabriel haughtily, “and he is to share my dinner.”

Mary shook her head over them, though she smiled, and ordered them to wash their faces and hands as she ran down to the kitchen to fetch a little more bread so that there should be enough for two hungry young boys. Then she sat down familiarly with them at the table, and they chattered and laughed merrily as the boys ate.

It was Sam who told his mother that he and Dean had brought the things Gabriel had wanted from the store in Thwaite. Gabriel was afraid that Mary might begin to ask difficult questions, but she did not. She was very much interested in the seeds and gardening tools, and there was only one moment when Gabriel was frightened. This was when she began to ask where the flowers were to be planted.

But at that moment, Sam replied for him.

His fingers flew very fast, and Gabriel only saw the signs for “secret”, and “not bad”, and “bird’s nest”, and “question”. But Mary laughed, and said “Tha’, a secret to keep? Eh, lad, o’course I doesn’t mind it. Tha’ can have all th’ secrets tha’ likes. I’ve knowed thee eight year’.’ ”

Gabriel blushed a little, and did his best not to look at Sam. It had not occurred to him that, in asking Sam and Dean not to tell anybody about the garden, he might have obliged them to lie to their mother.

“I haven’t asked anybody yet,” he said.

“Well, I wouldn’t ask th’ head gardener,” said Mary. “He’s too grand, Mr. Roach is.”

“I’ve never seen him. I’ve only seen under-gardeners. But if it was out of the way and no one wanted it, no one could mind my having it, could they?” Gabriel said anxiously.

“There wouldn’t be no reason,” answered Mary. “You wouldn’t do no harm.”

When the dinner was done Gabriel rose from the table. He was going to run to his room to put on his hat again, but Mary stopped him.

“I’ve got somethin’ to tell you,” she said. “I thought I’d let you eat your dinner first. Mr. Shurley came back this mornin’ and I think he wants to see you.”

Gabriel turned quite pale, and Sam, catching his mood, began to look alarmed.

“Oh!” Gabriel said. “Why! Why! He didn’t want to see me when I came. I heard Pitcher say he didn’t.”

“Well,” explained Mary, “he was walkin’ down th’ hall this mornin’, and I met him. Now, I’d never spoke to him before but now an’ then, but Mrs. Shurley came to our cottage two or three times, an’ I know she thought very well of me, so I made bold to stop him. I wanted to talk to him about you; an’ quite what he thought o’ me I don’t know, but th’ long an’ th’ short of it is, I think I put him in th’ mind to see you before he goes away again, tomorrow.”

“Oh!” cried Gabriel, “is he going away tomorrow? I am so glad! But I do wish you had not reminded him of me! When do you think he will want to see—”

He did not finish the sentence, because the door opened, and Mrs. Medlock walked in. She had on her best black dress and cap, and her collar was fastened with a large brooch with a picture of a man’s face on it. It was a coloured photograph of her wife who had died years ago, and she always wore it when she was dressed up. She looked stern and excited.

“Your face is dirty,” she said quickly. “Go and brush it. Mary, help him to slip on his best clothes—and you,” barely glancing at Sam, “you’ll have to get on outside quick as you can. Mr. Shurley sent me to bring the boy to him in his study.”

All the colour left Gabriel’s cheeks. His heart began to thump and he felt himself changing into a stiff, plain, rude child again. He did not even answer Mrs. Medlock or say goodbye to Sam, but turned and walked into his bedroom, followed by Mary. He said nothing while she dressed him in his best clothes, and brushed his hair; but when they came out again into the nursery he found that Sam was gone, and there was only a piece of paper left on the table. On the paper was a sort of picture. At first Gabriel could not tell what it was. Then he saw it was meant for a nest with a bird sitting on it.

“Eh!” said Mary with great pride. “I never knew our Sam was as clever as that. That there’s a picture of a missel thrush on her nest, as large as life an’ twice as natural.”

Then Gabriel knew Sam had meant the picture to be a message. He had meant that Gabriel might be sure that Sam and Dean would keep his secret. His garden was his nest and he was like a missel thrush.

He folded the paper up and kept his hand on it in his pocket as he followed Mrs. Medlock down the corridors, in silence. He was taken to a part of the house he had not been into before. At last Mrs. Medlock knocked at a door, and when some one said, “Come in,” they entered the room together. A man was sitting in an armchair before the fire, and Mrs. Medlock spoke to him.

“This is Master Gabriel, sir,” he said.

“You can go and leave him here. I will ring for you when I want you to take him away,” said Mr. Shurley.

When he went out and closed the door, Gabriel could only stand waiting, a plain little thing, clutching his thin hands stubbornly together behind his back. He could see that the man in the chair was not so much a hunchback as a man with high, rather crooked shoulders, and he had dark hair streaked with grey. He was wearing a heavy robe in some dark colour, with cigar ash on its lapels and ink on the sleeve cuffs. The smell of some strong adult drink clung to it. He turned his head over his high shoulders and spoke to Gabriel.

“Come here!” he said.

Gabriel went to him.

He was not ugly. His face would have been handsome if it had not been so nervous and miserable. He looked as if the sight of Gabriel worried and fretted him and as if he did not know what in the world to do with him.

“Are you well?” he asked.

“Yes,” answered Gabriel.

“Do they—do they take good care of you?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Charles Shurley rubbed his forehead fretfully as he looked Gabriel over.

“My God, it is her very image,” he muttered to himself; and then, as if remembering where he was, he said, “You are very thin.”

“I am getting fatter,” Gabriel boasted. He kicked a bit at the chair in front of him, and grinned in what he knew was his most impudent way, because he did not know what else to do.

What an unhappy face Mr. Shurley had! His blue eyes seemed as if they scarcely saw Gabriel, as if they were seeing something else, and he could hardly keep his thoughts upon him.

“I forgot you,” he said. “How could I remember you? I intended to send you a school master or a nurse, or some one of that sort, but I forgot.”

“I am too big for a nurse, and I am too clever for a school master,” said Gabriel. Then he went quite red. “That is—please, sir, don’t make me have a master yet!”

Mr. Shurley rubbed his forehead again and stared at him.

“That was what the Winchester woman said,” he muttered absentmindedly.

“Is she Mary Winchester?” asked Gabriel curiously.

“Yes, I think so.”

“She knows about children,” said Gabriel. “She has two, and her mother had twelve, and her brother had nine, and they all lived in a little cottage together for ever so long. She knows.”

Mr. Shurley seemed to rouse himself.

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to play out of doors,” Gabriel answered boldly. “I never liked it in India. It makes me hungry here, and I am getting fatter.”

Mr. Shurley was watching him, looking a little nervous and a little puzzled.

“Mrs. Winchester said it would do you good. Perhaps—perhaps it will,” he said. “She thought you had better get stronger before you had a master.”

“It makes me feel strong when I play and the wind comes over the moor,” argued Gabriel.

“Where do you play?”

“Everywhere,” gasped Gabriel, suddenly frightened. “I—I play with Mary’s boys, and I walk on our hands, and watch the birds, and run, and play, and splash in the brook in the woods—and I look about to see if things are beginning to stick up out of the earth. I don’t do any harm.”

“Don’t look so frightened,” Mr. Shurley said in a worried voice. “You could not do any harm, a child like you! You may do what you like.”

Gabriel actually leaped a little for hope and joy. He came a step closer. “May I?” he said.

Mr. Shurley frowned, and seemed to want to look away from Gabriel’s eager little face.

“Don’t—don’t look so anxious,” he exclaimed. “Of course you may. I am your guardian, though I am a poor one for any child. I cannot give you time or attention. I am too ill, and wretched and distracted, and my book does not come on at all; but I wish you to be happy and comfortable. I don’t know anything about children, but Mrs. Medlock is to see that you have all you need. I sent for you today because Mrs. Winchester said I ought to see you. She thought you needed fresh air and freedom and running about. She said—she said Mrs. Shurley had been kind to her.” It seemed hard for him to speak his dead wife’s name. “She is a respectable woman. Now I have seen you I think she said sensible things. Play out of doors as much as you like. It’s a big place and you may go where you like and amuse yourself as you like. Is there anything you want?” as if a sudden thought had struck him. “Do you want toys, books? A riding master?”

“Might I,” said Gabriel, seizing his chance—“might I have a bit of earth?”

In his eagerness, he did not realise how queer the words would sound and that they were not the ones he had meant to say. Mr. Shurley looked quite startled.

“Earth!” he repeated. “What do you mean?”

“To plant seeds in—to make things grow—to see them come alive,” Gabriel said, not knowing how his eyes were shining.

Mr. Shurley gazed at him a moment as if he was looking at something else altogether. Then he passed his hand quickly over his eyes, and poured something of a deep golden colour into a crystal glass from a crystal decanter. He seemed to need both hands to hold the glass steady when he drank from it.

“Do you—do you care about gardens so much,” he said slowly.

“I didn’t know about them in India,” said Gabriel. “I was always ill and tired and it was too hot. I sometimes made little beds in the sand and stuck flowers in them. But here it is different.”

Mr. Shurley got up and began to walk slowly across the room.

“A bit of earth,” he said to himself. When he stopped and spoke his blue eyes looked more nervous than ever, and he seemed hardly able to raise them to Gabriel’s face.

“You can have as much earth as you want,” he said. “You remind me of some one else who loved the earth and things that grow. When you see a bit of earth you want,” with something like a smile, “take it, child, and make it come alive.”

“May I take it from anywhere—if it’s not wanted?”

“Anywhere,” he answered. “There! You must go now, I am tired.” He touched the bell to call Mrs. Medlock. “Good-by. I shall be away all summer.”

 

 

Gabriel’s work in the garden and the excitement of the afternoon ended by making him feel quiet and thoughtful. He sat in his room for a long time and looked out of the window, until Mary could find time from her other work to come back. She stayed with him until tea-time, but they sat in comfortable quiet and talked very little. But just before Mary went downstairs to take away the tea-tray, Gabriel asked a question.

“Mary,” he said, “has the scullery-maid had the tooth-ache again today?”

Mary certainly started slightly.

“What makes thee ask that?” she said.

“Because when Mrs. Medlock was leading me back from Mr. Shurley’s apartment I heard that far-off crying again, just as we heard it the other night. There isn’t a wind today, so you see it couldn’t have been the wind.”

“Eh!” said Mary uneasily. “Tha’ mustn’t go walkin’ about in corridors an’ listenin’. Mr. Shurley would be that there angry there’s no knowin’ what he’d do.”

“I wasn’t listening,” said Gabriel. “I was just walking along—and I heard it. That’s three times.”

“There’s nothing to it but thine imaginin’s,” said Mary firmly. “It don’t do to go thinkin’ on things like that, and pryin’ into other people’s business. But that was a real kindness tha’ did for my Sam earlier. There! He was that thrilled to come into th’ house, and to look at all thy fine things, and to share tha’ dinner with thee. And I does like to see him writin’ out his words like that all clear on paper, puttin’ th’ whole sentence down just so instead o’ just signin’ out th’ two or three words it takes for Dean or me to catch at his meanin’ most times. That was well thought of. Thank ye, lad.”

Gabriel went a little red, and held out his hand because he did not know what else to do.

“Thank _you_ ,” he said, rather stiffly, because he was not used to thanking people or noticing that they did things for him, “for what you said to Mr. Shurley. He said I might have my bit of earth, and play outside, and not have a school master yet, and—thank you.”

Mary gave his hand a clumsy little shake, as if she was not accustomed to this sort of thing either. Then she laughed.

“Eh! th’art a queer old man o’ a thing,” she said. “If tha’d been any of our lads tha’d have given me a kiss.”

Gabriel thought of Sam’s impulsive caresses, and looked stiffer than ever.

“Do you want me to kiss you?”

Mary laughed again.

“Nay, not me,” she answered. “If tha’ was different, p’raps tha’d want to thysel’. But tha’ isn’t.”


	11. Castiel

Gabriel fell asleep looking forward to the morning. But you never know what the weather will do in Yorkshire, particularly in the springtime. He was awakened in the night by the sound of rain beating with heavy drops against his window. It was pouring down in torrents and the wind was “wuthering” round the corners and in the chimneys of the huge old house. Gabriel sat up in bed and felt miserable and angry.

“The rain is as contrary as I ever was,” he said. “It came because it knew I did not want it.”

He threw himself back on his pillow and buried his face. He did not cry, but he lay and hated the sound of the heavily beating rain, he hated the wind and its wuthering. He could not go to sleep again. The mournful sound kept him awake because he felt mournful himself. If he had felt happy it would probably have lulled him to sleep. How it wuthered and how the big raindrops poured down and beat against the pane!

“It sounds just like a person lost on the moor and wandering on and on crying,” he said.

He could not lie still when he felt angry, and instead he climbed out of bed and went to the window, and glared out at the storm. He wanted to run about and shout at things; and at last, feeling contrary and rebellious, he pulled on his boots and his dressing gown over his night things. He had the notion to explore the house in the dark—partly because he thought it rather adventurous to imagine he was looking for ghosts, but mostly because he knew he mustn’t.

There was a candle by his bedside and he took it up and went softly out of the room. The corridor looked very long and dark, but he was too excited to mind that. He crept up and down corridors and in and out of rooms for some time, listening to the strange noises the wind made, and jumping now and then at the shapes that his candle made when it fell on drapes or curtains or strange objects that he hadn’t expected. Everything looked very queer and mysterious in the dark, and it was so thrilling that it almost made him forget how angry he was at the storm.

He had just turned down a long corridor hung with strange old portraits when suddenly something made him shrink against the wall and almost blow out the candle in his alarm. He listened and he listened. Then he stood up straight, with a very different kind of thrill.

“It isn’t the wind now,” he said in a loud whisper. “That isn’t the wind. It is different. It is that crying I heard before.”

The sound came down the corridor, a far-off faint sound of fretful crying. He felt as if he must find out what it was. It seemed even stranger than the secret garden and the buried key. Perhaps the fact that he was in a rebellious mood made him bold.

“I am going to find out what it is,” he said. “It might be a real ghost. I shouldn’t be surprised if it was. There must be ever so many ghosts in this house. Everybody is in bed and I don’t care about Mrs. Medlock—I don’t care!”

He thought he remembered the corners he must turn to find the short corridor with the door covered with tapestry—the one Mrs. Medlock had come through the day he lost himself. The sound had come up that passage. So he went on with his dim light, his heart beating so loud that he fancied he could hear it. The far-off faint crying went on and led him. Sometimes it stopped for a moment or so and then began again. Was this the right corner to turn? He stopped and thought. Yes it was. Down this passage and then to the left, and then up two broad steps, and then to the right again. Yes, there was the tapestry door.

He pushed it open very gently and closed it behind him, and he stood in the corridor and could hear the crying quite plainly, though it was not loud. It was on the other side of the wall at his left and a few yards farther on there was a door. He could see a glimmer of light coming from beneath it. The _someone_ was crying in that room, and it was quite a young _someone_.

So he walked to the door and pushed it open, and there he was standing in the room!

It was a big room with ancient, handsome furniture in it. There was a low fire glowing faintly on the hearth and a night light burning by the side of a carved four-posted bed hung with brocade, and on the bed was lying a girl, crying fretfully.

Gabriel wondered if he was in a real place or if he had fallen asleep again and was dreaming without knowing it.

The girl had a sharp, delicate face the colour of ivory and she seemed to have eyes too big for it. Never had Master Gabriel seen such tired and such blue eyes in any body’s face before. She had also a lot of hair which tumbled over her forehead and down about her shoulders in heavy dark locks and made her thin face seem smaller. She looked like a girl who had been ill, but she was crying more as if she were tired than as if she were in pain.

Gabriel stood near the door with his candle in his hand, holding his breath. Then he crept across the room, and, as he drew nearer, the light attracted the girl’s attention and she turned her head on her pillow and stared at him, her blue eyes opening so wide that they seemed immense.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said at last in a half-frightened whisper, and sat up in bed to look at him. “Nobody is allowed to be here in the night.”

“Who are you?” Gabriel asked, his own whisper sounding not at all so brave as he would have liked. “Are you a ghost?”

She stared and stared and stared. Her eyes were as blue as the sky over the moor, only they looked too big for her face, because it had no colour in it at all, only lashes and hair so dark they seemed almost black.

“No,” she replied after waiting a moment or so. “I am Castiel. Are you one?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Gabriel. “I am Gabriel Milton. Mr. Shurley is my uncle.”

“He is my father,” said the girl.

“Your father!” exclaimed Gabriel, and folded his arms over his chest. “No one ever told me he had a girl! Why didn’t they?”

The girl’s eyes, which had been wide and wondering, suddenly became very narrow, and actually seemed to flash blue fire. “I am _not_ a girl,” she said. “I am a boy, and my name is Castiel Shurley.”

“Oh,” said Gabriel, and stared at her curiously. “You _look_ like a girl.”

“If they made you grow _your_ hair long,” retorted Master Castiel Shurley with dignity, “and dress in girls’ clothes, then so should you. What did you say your name was?”

“Gabriel Milton.”

“Come here,” the boy said, still keeping his strange eyes fixed on Gabriel with an anxious expression.

Gabriel came close to the bed and Castiel put out his hand and touched him.

“You are real, aren’t you?” Castiel said, frowning a solemn frown. “I have such real dreams very often. You might be one of them.”

Gabriel laughed suddenly and climbed up onto the bed, reaching out with his fingers. “Shall I pinch you?”

Castiel only looked at his hand with a puzzled expression and did not try to push him away, as any ordinary boy might. “Do you want to pinch me?”

“A little,” Gabriel said. “For a minute I thought you might be a dream too. I will pinch you, and then you shall pinch me, and then we shall both of us know that we’re awake.”

Castiel did not wince at the nip of Gabriel’s fingers, and his own solemnly returned pinch was made with fingers so pale and weak that Gabriel hardly felt it.

“Where did you come from?” Castiel asked.

“From my own room. The wind wuthered so I couldn’t go to sleep and I heard some one crying and wanted to find out who it was. I thought that, if it was a ghost, it might be something interesting to look at. It might have a _cruel and tragical story_ to tell me. Did no one ever tell you I had come to live here? What were you crying for?”

“Because I don’t like to cry during the day. It makes me ill and fretful, and then I can’t look at my books. And besides, my head ached.” He spoke in a queer, stiff way, with his voice pitched rather low and every phrase as formal as a book. It was nothing like the carefree tumble of Dean’s speech, or Mary’s warm, easy cadences. It seemed all of a piece with the awkward delicacy of his hands.

“Why did they not tell me about you?” asked Gabriel eagerly. “Why did you not know about me?”

“They never tell me anything.”

“How unfair!” cried Gabriel at once.

Castiel only looked more puzzled. “Why should I know anything that is not meant for me to know?”

“Oh, what a queer house this is!” Gabriel said. “What a queer house! Everything is a kind of secret. Rooms are locked up and gardens are locked up—and you! Have you been locked up?”

“No. I stay in this room because I don’t want to be moved out of it.”

“Why?” asked Gabriel.

“It tires me too much. Besides, I won’t let people see me and talk me over.”

“Why?” Gabriel asked again, feeling more mystified every moment.

“Because I am like this always, ill and having to lie down. My father won’t let people talk me over either. The servants are not allowed to speak about me. If I live I may be a cripple and ugly, but I shan’t live. My father hates to think I may be like him.”

“Does your father come and see you?” Gabriel demanded. This was no ghost, but everything about Castiel awoke his curiosity more than any ghost of his imagination could possibly do. For every question that Castiel answered, five more seemed to crowd in behind it, so that Gabriel was almost too impatient to hear what he had said to the first.

“Sometimes, when I am asleep. He doesn’t want to see me. I hardly even know what he looks like.”

“Why?” Gabriel could not help asking again.

A sort of angry shadow passed over the boy’s face.

“My mother died not long after I was born and it makes him wretched to look at me. He thinks I don’t know, but I’ve heard people talking. He almost hates me.”

“He hates the garden, because she died,” said Gabriel half speaking to himself.

The boy peered at him curiously. “What garden?”

“Oh! just—just a garden she used to like,” Gabriel stammered. “Have you been here always?”

“Nearly always. Sometimes I have been taken to places at the seaside, but I won’t stay because people stare at me. I hate it when people look at me. They whisper, and make remarks behind their hands, and make sorry faces at the nurse. And if I am angry and scowl at them they scold me and tell me I have a temper, or that my manners are poor. I used to wear an iron thing to keep my back straight, but a grand doctor came from London to see me and said it was stupid. He told them to take it off and keep me out in the fresh air. I hate fresh air and I don’t want to go out. If I go out I have to wear a dress, and stockings, and petticoats. I don’t let them dress me now, not ever. I won’t wear anything but my nightshirt and dressing gown.”

“Why do they make you dress like a girl?” said Gabriel.

“Because they say that I am one,” said Castiel. For the first time, something like colour crept into his paper-white cheeks—not the flush of healthy exercise, but the shadow of a stubborn, fretful passion. “But I’m not. I’m _not_.”

“Oh,” said Gabriel, puzzled. Then he thought of something all at once.

“If you don’t like people to see you,” he began, “do you want me to go away?”

Castiel took hold of the hem of Gabriel’s dressing gown and gave it a little pull. “No,” he said. “I should be sure you were a dream if you went. If you are real, you should talk. I want to hear about you.”

Gabriel did not want to go away at all. He wanted to stay in the mysterious hidden-away room and talk to the mysterious boy.

“What do you want me to tell you?” he said.

Castiel wanted to know how long Gabriel had been at Misselthwaite; he wanted to know which corridor his room was on; he wanted to know what he had been doing; if he disliked the moor and fresh air as Castiel disliked them; where he had lived before he came to Yorkshire. Gabriel answered all these questions and many more and Castiel lay back on his pillow and listened. When he was not asking or answering questions, Castiel was rather quiet, and almost dreamy; and soon Gabriel chattered on without needing to be asked. He told Castiel a great deal about India and about his voyage across the ocean; and then he began to ask about Castiel again. He found out that because Castiel had been an invalid he had not learned things as other children had. One of his nurses had taught him to read when he was quite little and he was always reading and looking at pictures in splendid books and learning his French and German and Latin. Every day they brought him three books—which ones they would be he did not know until they were given to him—and he studied one book from breakfast to dinner, then another from dinner until tea, and the last from tea until supper.

“What if you don’t like the books they give you?” Gabriel asked; and Castiel gave him another of his puzzled looks.

“It isn’t my business to like them or to not like them,” he replied indifferently. “I read what is given to me. I suppose Mrs. Medlock knows best.”

Gabriel tossed his little head. “I don’t believe Mrs. Medlock knows anything about books at all. If somebody gave me a book that _I_ didn’t like, and expected me to read it for hours and hours and wouldn’t let me change it for one I wanted, I should hit them with it.”

“I am not allowed to be angry. It makes me ill,” Castiel said. “No one believes I shall live to grow up.”

He said it as if he was so accustomed to the idea that it had ceased to matter to him at all. He seemed to like the sound of Gabriel’s voice. As Gabriel went on talking Castiel listened in a drowsy, interested way. Once or twice Gabriel wondered if he were not gradually falling into a doze. But at last he asked a question which opened up a new subject.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“I am ten,” answered Gabriel, forgetting himself for the moment, “and so are you.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because you were born just before she died and the garden door was locked and the key was buried. And it has been locked for ten years.”

Castiel half sat up, turning toward him, leaning on his elbows.

“What garden door was locked? Who did it? Where was the key buried?” he exclaimed as if he were suddenly very much interested.

“It—it was the garden Mr. Shurley hates,” said Gabriel nervously. “He locked the door. No one—no one knew where he buried the key.”

“What sort of a garden is it?” Castiel persisted eagerly. It was the most animation that Gabriel had seen in his pale little face, and Gabriel knew he must answer very carefully.

“No one has been allowed to go into it for ten years.”

But it was too late to be careful. Castiel was too much like himself. He too had had nothing to think about and the idea of a hidden garden attracted him as it had attracted Gabriel. He asked question after question. Where was it? Had he never looked for the door? Had he never asked the gardeners?

“They won’t talk about it,” said Gabriel. “I think they have been told not to answer questions.”

“Oh,” said Castiel; and all at once the light went out of his eyes, and he lay back against his pillows, and looked almost as dull as before—though now there was perhaps something like wistfulness behind it.

Gabriel felt both relieved and a little sorry at this sudden change. How peculiar this boy was, and how coolly he spoke of not living.

“Do _you_ think you won’t live?” he asked.

“I don’t suppose I shall,” Castiel answered indifferently. “Ever since I remember anything I have heard people say I shan’t. At first they thought I was too little to understand and now they think I don’t hear. But I do. My doctor is my father’s cousin. He is quite poor and if I die he will have all Misselthwaite when my father is dead. I should think he wouldn’t want me to live. And everybody says my mother was very pretty and sweet, and I should think my father would want a daughter like that.”

“Do you want to live?” inquired Gabriel.

“No,” he answered, in a cross, tired fashion. “But I don’t want to die. When I feel ill I lie here and think about it until I cry.”

Gabriel found that he did not like the way Castiel talked about dying.

“If,” he said carefully, “if nobody is allowed to talk about the garden, and nobody knows where it is, then that means that we can _imagine_ it however we like. It would be quite like having a secret of our own. Have you ever had a secret?”

Castiel thought about this. “Only that one about not living to grow up,” he said slowly. “They don’t know I know that, so it is a sort of secret. And once, I stole the embroidery scissors before the nurse could tidy away the sewing things. I kept them for four days before they took them away again. It pleased me to know that I had them there, and could use them whenever I pleased. But I don’t think that could be the same kind of secret.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Gabriel imperiously—“embroidery scissors aren’t like having a garden, all of your own. You see, if no one knows but ourselves—if there was a door, hidden somewhere under the ivy—if there was—and we could find it; and if we could slip through it together and shut it behind us, and no one knew any one was inside and we called it our garden and pretended that—that we were missel thrushes and it was our nest, and if we played there almost every day and dug and planted seeds and made it all come alive—”

“Is it dead?” Castiel interrupted him.

“It soon will be if no one cares for it. The bulbs will live but the roses—”

“What are bulbs?” Castiel put in quickly.

“They are daffodils and lilies and snowdrops. They are working in the earth now—pushing up pale green points because the spring is coming.”

“Is the spring coming?” Castiel said. “What is it like? You don’t see it in rooms if you are ill.”

“It is—the sun shining on the rain, and the rain falling on the sunshine, and things pushing up and working under the earth,” said Gabriel. “If the garden was a secret and we could get into it we could watch the things grow bigger every day, and see how many roses are alive. And if we can’t, well then, we can simply sit here and tell each other stories of what it _might_ be like, and the grown-ups will never know.”

“I should... like that,” Castiel said very slowly, his eyes looking dreamy. “I should like that. Isn’t that queer? It would be like having something that was just mine.”

“I’ll tell you what I think it would be like, if we could go into it,” Gabriel said. “It has been shut up so long things have grown into a tangle perhaps.”

Castiel lay quite still and listened while Gabriel went on talking about the roses which might have clambered from tree to tree and hung down—about the many birds which might have built their nests there because it was so safe. And then he told him about the robin, and there was so much to tell about the robin and it was so easy and safe to talk about it that he ceased to be afraid. The robin pleased Castiel so much that he smiled until he looked almost beautiful, and at first Gabriel had thought that he was even plainer than himself, with his big eyes and heavy locks of hair.

“I did not know birds could be like that,” he said. “But if you stay in a room you never see things. What a lot of things you know. I feel as if you had been inside that garden.”

Gabriel did not know what to say, so he did not say anything. Castiel evidently did not expect an answer and the next moment he gave Gabriel a surprise.

“I am going to let you look at something,” he said. “Do you see that rose-coloured silk curtain hanging on the wall over the mantel-piece?”

Gabriel had not noticed it before, but he looked up and saw it. It was a curtain of soft silk hanging over what seemed to be some picture.

“Yes,” he answered.

“There is a cord hanging from it,” said Castiel. “Go and pull it.”

Gabriel got up, much mystified, and found the cord. When he pulled it the silk curtain ran back on rings and when it ran back it uncovered a picture. It was the picture of a girl with a laughing face. She had bright hair tied up with a blue ribbon, just the same colour as Gabriel’s, and her eyes looked like Gabriel’s too; but the fine bones of her face and the shape of her gay, lovely mouth were just like Castiel’s, though his looked unhappy, and she looked as though she thought everything was delightful.

“She is my mother,” said Castiel, in his resigned way. “She died because of me.”

“How queer!” said Gabriel.

“If she had lived I believe I should not have been ill always,” Castiel said, and he pulled the blankets up petulantly to cover his face, so that his voice came out muffled. “I dare say I should have lived, too. And my father would not have hated to look at me. I dare say I should have had a strong back. Draw the curtain again.”

Gabriel did as he was told and returned to sit on Castiel’s bed.

“She is much prettier than you,” he said, “but her face is just like yours. Your eyes look like your father’s, though.”

“She smiles too much when I am ill and miserable,” grumbled Castiel.

Gabriel put out a hand and pulled the blankets away from his face. “I think her eyes look like _mine_. Do you think they do?”

Castiel scowled at him. His hair was even more rumpled than before, and he looked tired and cross. “Why should they look like yours? She’s _my_ mother.”

“I think my father was her brother,” said Gabriel carelessly, “though his eyes were grey.”

“Oh,” said Castiel, and looked uncomfortable. “I suppose you look like her. A little.”

There were a few moments of silence and then Castiel spoke again.

“Her name was Gabrielle. It’s the name of an angel. Perhaps your father named you after her.”

“Was it? How strange! I never knew there was any such person, until I came here,” Gabriel said. Then he scowled. “My fathers never told me about anything.”

“At least you saw yours sometimes,” retorted Castiel, hugging his blankets to his chest and scowling back at him. “I only see Mrs. Medlock, and the nurse, and sometimes Mary or one of the other servants. I had to choose an angel name for myself. They only call me Claire.”

“At least _one_ of your parents is alive,” Gabriel replied. “What would Mrs. Medlock do if she found out that I had been here?”

Castiel hesitated. “She wouldn’t—you would not be allowed,” he said. “At least, I don’t think you would. You don’t seem to belong in this room. It isn’t orderly.”

He said _it isn’t orderly_ in the way another person might have said _it isn’t right_ , or _I wouldn’t enjoy it_. To Gabriel it seemed as if he were a native, saying _it is not the custom_ , and it made him quite contrary.

“Well,” said Gabriel, in his decided way, “she shan’t tell _me_ what to do. I shall come all the same, unless she locks me up. That is, if you want me to come.”

“I do,” said Castiel at once, and there was something like eagerness in his poor, thin little face. “I _do_ want you to come. I think you shall be a secret, too. I will not tell them until they find out. I shall—I shall send the nurse out of the room and say that I want to be by myself.”

He said this with that peculiar mix of imperiousness and diffidence that was so often in his manner; and Gabriel gazed at him as if he had been set wondering.

“Why do you look at me like that?” Castiel asked him. “What are you thinking about?”

“I was thinking,” said Gabriel, “how different you are from Sam.”

“Who is Sam?” he said.

Gabriel might as well tell him, he thought. He could talk about Sam and Dean without mentioning the secret garden. He had liked to hear Mary talk about them. Besides, he longed to talk about them. 

“He is Mary’s son. He is eight years old,” Gabriel explained. “Dean is Sam’s brother, and he is twelve. They are not like any one else in the world. They live out on the moor all day, and all the creatures there are friends with them, even the shy ones. Dean knows all there is to know about animals, and about gardens and growing things. Sam can charm foxes and squirrels and birds just as the natives in India charm snakes. He plays a very soft tune on a pipe and they come and listen.”

Castiel lay back on his cushion and his eyes grew larger and larger and the spots on his cheeks burned. “Do they run around together all day?” he asked.

“Almost always,” said Gabriel. “Mary says that as soon as Sam could walk he would follow Dean everywhere, and that now, it’s the other way around.”

“I wish I had a brother,” said Castiel slowly.

“Do you know,” said Gabriel suddenly, “there is one thing we never thought of. We are cousins.”

It seemed so strange that they should have talked and talked and never remembered this simple fact that he laughed; and Castiel stared at him for a moment as if he did not understand what it meant, and then he laughed too.It was a stiff, rusty little sound, and it only lasted for a moment, but it crinkled up his nose and made his eyes look bluer and bluer.

“Tell me some more about Sam and Dean,” he said eagerly.

“They know all about eggs and nests,” Gabriel went on. “And they know where foxes and badgers and otters live. They keep them secret so that other boys won’t find their holes and frighten them. They know about everything that grows or lives on the moor.”

“Do they like the moor?” said Castiel. “How can they when it’s such a great, bare, dreary place?”

“It’s the most beautiful place,” protested Gabriel. “Thousands of lovely things grow on it and there are thousands of little creatures all busy building nests and making holes and burrows and chippering or singing or squeaking to each other. They are so busy and having such fun under the earth or in the trees or heather. It’s their world.”

“I couldn’t go on the moor,” Castiel said in a sorrowful tone, and poked irritably at his quilt.

Gabriel was silent for a minute and then he said something bold. “You might—sometime.”

Castiel moved as if he were startled.

“Go on the moor! How could I? I am going to die.”

“How do you know?” said Gabriel unsympathetically.

“Oh, I’ve heard it ever since I remember,” Castiel answered crossly. “They are always whispering about it and thinking I don’t notice. They wish I would, too.”

“If they wished I would,” Gabriel said, “I wouldn’t. Shall I go away now? Your eyes look sleepy.”

“I wish I could go to sleep before you leave me,” Castiel said rather shyly.

“Shut your eyes,” said Gabriel, clambering up to sit by his head, “and I will do what my Ayah used to do in India. I will pat your hand and stroke it and sing something quite low.”

“I should like that perhaps,” Castiel said drowsily.

Somehow Gabriel was sorry for him and did not want him to lie awake, so he leaned against the bed and began to stroke and pat his hand and sing a very low little chanting song in Hindustani.

“That is nice,” Castiel said more drowsily still, and Gabriel went on chanting and stroking, but when he looked at Castiel again his black lashes were lying close against his cheeks, for his eyes were shut and he was fast asleep.

Gabriel really meant to get up, and take his candle, and creep away; only he was becoming rather drowsy as well, and thought that he might just close his eyes for a few minutes, so as not to wake Castiel up. And of course, between the excitement of the night and the lateness of the hour, he fell asleep almost at once.


	12. A young Rajah

Gabriel slept later than usual the next morning, and even Castiel slept a deeper and more restful sleep than he was used to. So it was that they were both woken up, not by the light of dawn or the sound of birds singing, but by brisk footsteps and voices in the corridor. In another moment the door opened, and in walked Dr. Shurley, Mrs. Medlock, and Mary.

Dr. Shurley started in actual alarm and Mrs. Medlock almost fell back because he had accidentally bumped against her.

“Good Lord!” exclaimed poor Mrs. Medlock with her eyes almost starting out of her head. “Good Lord!”

“What is this?” said Dr. Shurley, coming forward. “What does it mean?”

Castiel had sat bolt upright in the bed all at once with a look almost of panic in his wide blue eyes, but now he folded his hands in his lap and sat there neat and prim, with an expression of stubborn calm.

When he saw that Castiel would say nothing, Gabriel wriggled out from under the blankets and sat up. “Castiel is my cousin,” he said. “Why did you never tell me I had a cousin? I like him. I am going to come and talk to him very often.”

Dr. Shurley turned reproachfully to Mrs. Medlock.

“Oh, sir,” she panted. “I don’t know how it’s happened. There’s not a servant on the place tha’d dare to talk—they all have their orders.”

“Nobody told me anything,” said Gabriel. “I heard him crying and found him myself. He was glad I came. We talked and talked!”

Mrs. Medlock hurried toward them and took Gabriel by the arm, pulling him to his feet. “Miss Claire, in your bed?” she said, in a shaking voice.

Gabriel scowled at her and tried to squirm away from her grip. She only held him more tightly, however, until Mary picked up his dressing gown from the ground and came toward him to wrap it around his shoulders.

“There, ma’am, they are only children,” she said; and she didn’t seem to think there was anything the matter at all.

Gabriel saw that Dr. Shurley did not look pleased. He sat down by Castiel and held out his hand. Castiel obediently held out his own; and Dr. Shurley counted his pulse by the ticking of his pocket watch.

“I am afraid there has been too much excitement. Excitement is not good for you, my girl,” he said.

Castiel said nothing, only he scowled down at his hands. It seemed that Castiel in the presence of grown-ups was quite a different creature to the curious, demanding little creature that he had been with Gabriel during the night. He looked more like a girl in his manners and the turn of his head, and at the same time he seemed smaller somehow. Gabriel found he did not like the change at all; and so he raised his voice, as he always did when he was feeling contrary.

“He wasn’t excited,” said Gabriel loudly, although they were both bending over Castiel and not looking at him. “I asked him if I should go away and he made me stay. He asked me questions and I sat on a big footstool and talked to him about India and about the robin and gardens. He wouldn’t let me go. He let me see his mother’s picture. Before I left him I sang him to sleep.”

Mrs. Medlock turned on Gabriel with a terrible expression.

“What did I tell you about meddlin’ where you’re not wanted, child? Your cousin is an invalid, do you understand? Her mind and her health are easily upset. I won’t have thee comin’ in here spoilin’ all the doctor’s work with stirrin’ her up, and breakin’ up her sleep, and encouragin’ her to believe what she oughtn’t. And were she as healthy and natural a child as ever ran about on th’ moors, still it is a wicked thing for a boy to come to a girl’s room of a night.”

At these words Castiel lifted his head, and Gabriel saw the blue fire in his eyes that had flashed there once before. The passive, sullen child vanished at once, and when he spoke he was as imperious as a Rajah.

“It should be a wicked thing to keep him away,” he said. “Gabriel is my cousin, and I like him. He is to come and see me whenever I choose. Do you hear?”

Mrs. Medlock seemed about to protest; but Dr. Shurley looked grave, and said, “Perhaps we may try the experiment. But it should be in small doses; and you ought to have the nurse with you, to see that he keeps quiet and does not make you agitated.”

“I should be agitated if he kept away,” answered Castiel, his eyes beginning to look dangerously sparkling. “I am better. Gabriel makes me better. Mary must bring up his breakfast with mine. We will have breakfast together.”

“Well,” said Mary briskly, “if tha’s an appetite for tha’ breakfast, that’s the best news I’ve heard of thee in a month.”

Dr. Shurley did not stay very long. He talked with Mrs. Medlock and Mary for a few minutes and said a few words of warning to Castiel. He must not talk too much; he must not forget that he was ill; he must not forget that he was very easily tired. Gabriel thought that there seemed to be a number of uncomfortable things Castiel was not to forget.

Castiel looked fretful and kept his strange blue eyes fixed on Dr. Shurley’s face.

“I want to forget it,” he said at last. “Gabriel makes me forget it. That is why I want him.”

Dr. Shurley did not look happy when he left the room. He gave a puzzled glance at the little boy fidgeting in the corner. He seemed a pert, boisterous child, and he could not see what the attraction was as a bedside companion. The girl actually did look brighter, however, and he sighed rather heavily as he went down the corridor.

When he was gone, Mrs. Medlock was quick to leave herself. She seemed to wish to scold more, or to insist on Gabriel’s returning to his room; but though Castiel was biddable in most matters, even she did not dare oppose him in his rare tyrannical moods, for fear of driving him to hysterics.

When she left, Castiel saw Gabriel looking at him thoughtfully.

“Why do you look at me like that?” he asked. “What are you thinking about?”

“Once in India I saw a boy who was a Rajah. He had rubies and emeralds and diamonds stuck all over him. He spoke to his people just as you spoke to Mrs. Medlock. Everybody had to do everything he told them—in a minute. I think they would have been killed if they hadn’t.”

“Oh,” said Castiel, and seemed a little pleased. “I suppose they _ought_ to do everything I say, when my father is away; but they are always telling me to do things I don’t like.”

“Then why do you listen to them?”

“Because they are doing their best to make me into a perfect daughter, and if they do, my father might stay. Besides, I haven’t anything else I’d rather do instead,” said Castiel earnestly, as Mary brought in their breakfast. “Now, if you’ll eat I will. Those muffins look so nice and hot. Tell me about Rajahs.”

 

 

Gabriel returned to his own rooms around the middle of the morning, when Castiel declared himself tired and Mary ordered him to sleep. The mist had cleared away from the moor, but the rain had not stopped pouring down. There could be no going out of doors. Mary was so busy with Castiel that Gabriel had no opportunity of talking to her, but in the afternoon he asked her to come and sit with him in the nursery. She came bringing the stocking she was knitting, and she sat down at once by the fire and started talking.

“I can scarcely believe thee!” she said with a laugh. “It’s as if tha’d walked straight into a lion’s den. If Miss Claire’d been like she is most times she’d have throwed herself into one of her tantrums and roused th’ house. She won’t let strangers look at her.”

“He let me look at him. I looked at him all the time and he looked at me. We stared!” said Gabriel. “I think he almost liked me.”

“Then tha’ must have bewitched her!” decided Mary, drawing a long breath.

“Do you mean Magic?” inquired Gabriel. “I’ve heard about Magic in India, but I can’t make it. I just went into his room and I was so surprised to see him I stood and stared. And then he turned round and stared at me. And he thought I was a ghost or a dream and I thought perhaps he was. And it was so queer being there alone together in the middle of the night and not knowing about each other. And we began to ask each other questions. And when I asked him if I must go away he said I must not.”

“Well,” said Mary, with a wondering laugh, “th’ world’s comin’ to a end!”

Gabriel frowned. This seemed to him to be a silly thing to say. He wondered a little why a sensible woman like Mary should say such a thing; and he wondered too why she should talk about Castiel as if he were a girl after all. But grown-ups always saw things rather differently, and sometimes they didn’t understand things that were really rather simple.

“What is the matter with him?” asked Gabriel.

“Nobody knows for sure and certain,” said Mary. “Mr. Shurley went off his head like when Mrs. Shurley died. Th’ doctors thought he’d have to be put in a ‘sylum. Miss Claire were only a few month old, but her father wouldn’t set eyes on th’ babe. He just raved and said it’d be another hunchback like him and it’d better die.”

“Is Castiel a hunchback?” Gabriel asked. “He didn’t look like one.”

“She isn’t yet,” said Mary. “But she began all wrong. There was enough trouble and raging in th’ house to set any child wrong. They was afraid her back was weak an’ they’ve always been takin’ care of it—keepin’ her lyin’ down an’ not lettin’ her walk. Once they made her wear a brace but she fretted so she was downright ill. Then a big doctor came to see her an’ made them take it off. He talked to th’ other doctor quite rough—in a polite way. He said there’d been too much medicine and too much fussin’.”

“Do you think he will die?” asked Gabriel.

“There’s no reason why any child should live that gets no fresh air an’ doesn’t do nothin’ but lie on their back an’ read their books an’ take medicine. She’s weak and hates th’ trouble o’ bein’ taken out o’ doors, an’ she gets cold so easy she says it makes her ill.”

Gabriel sat and looked at the fire.

“I wonder,” he said slowly, “if it would not do him good to go out into a garden and watch things growing. It did me good. Does he really have nothing to do but read?”

“She likes knittin’, sometimes, and she’s wonderful patient at it when she’s in a good humour; but then, she’ll get into such a pet about it, she’ll not look at th’ needles and wool for weeks at a time. Sewin’ and fancywork, now, them she can’t abide. She calls it girls’ work, an’ says as lookin’ so close at the needle and the threads and the silks and so on makes her head ache. Besides, Mrs. Medlock won’t let her keep th’ scissors when nobody’s by her.”

“Why not?”

“For fear she try to cut her hair off. She’s done it twice before now. Eh! it was a shame. Such lovely hair as she has, and th’ last time, all she had was th’ embroidery scissors, which is such short little things, she madea right mess of it all.”

“Can’t girls have short hair, if they like?”

“To tell thee th’ truth, I don’t see as it would do the child any harm to try an’ cut it. There’s not nobody as is going to see it, after all. She does have such a dreadful stubborn temper in such things that settin’ a wall in her way only makes her more set on jumpin’ over it—or breakin’ it down with her head.”

Gabriel thought over this in silence. Perhaps it was only the difference of _he_ and _she_ , and _Castiel_ and _Claire_ , but it seemed to him as though he and the grown-ups were talking about two very different people.

After a minute or so, Mary looked up at him over her knitting. “I always calls her Castiel, when it’s just the two of us in th’ room,” she said slowly. “If ever she does grow into a healthy young lass, these freaks and humours will settle thessel’ down, and all the quicker for her not quarrellin’ over it every step o’ the way. Tha’ mustna talk about her like as she’s a boy where Mrs. Medlock can hear thee, for she won’t have anybody encouragin’ it; but if it’s just the two of you, tha’ just do as tha’ likes, Master Gabriel. She’s a lonely little thing, for all she’s so spoiled. It’ll do her good to have another child about the place. There’s nothing like a playfellow for learnin’ a child to wake up an’ look about ‘em.”

Gabriel sniffed, and tossed his little head; but he thought about it, all the same.


	13. Nest-building

After another week of rain the high arch of blue sky appeared again and the sun which poured down was quite hot. Though there had been no chance to see either the secret garden or Sam and Dean, Master Gabriel had enjoyed himself very much. The week had not seemed long. He had spent hours of every day with Castiel in his room, talking about Rajahs or gardens, or Sam and Dean. To talk about _them_ meant to talk about foxes and ravens, and walking on one’s hands, and the moor with the sun on it, and pale green points sticking up out of the black sod. And it was all so alive that Gabriel talked more than he had ever talked before—and Castiel both talked and listened as he had never done either before. When Castiel was amused and interested Gabriel thought he scarcely looked like an invalid at all, except that his face was so colourless and he was always on the sofa. They looked at the splendid books and pictures and sometimes Gabriel had read things to Castiel, and sometimes Castiel had read a little to him. And they both began to laugh over nothings as children will when they are happy together. And they laughed so that in the end they were making as much noise as if they had been two ordinary healthy natural ten-year-old creatures—instead of a hard, little, unloving child and a sickly boy who believed that he was going to die.

“You are a sly young one to listen and get out of your bed to go following things up like you did that night,” Mrs. Medlock said once. “But there’s no saying it’s not been a sort of blessing to the lot of us. She’s not had a tantrum or a fit of her sulks since you made friends. The nurse was just going to give up the case because she was so sick of her, but she says she doesn’t mind staying now you’ve gone on duty with her,” laughing a little.

Gabriel had had nobody to tell him what to do or when to do it since he had arrived in Yorkshire. But at every chime of the clock above Castiel’s mantelpiece there was a bustle of things to be done. This hour was given over to his bath—that to studying languages—the next to mathematics or history—another to resting—then to embroidery, or to reading books, or to a meal, or to something else altogether. The curious thing, to Gabriel, was that Castiel never seemed to _choose_ what he did next—that was decided by Mrs. Medlock or the nurse at the start of every day, and the books given to him were chosen from the library by another servant, apparently without much care to what a child might like to look at. And yet there was no persuading Castiel to depart from the order of his day.

He insisted on having Gabriel added to his schedule. For one hour they could talk, and no more; and although he was happy to have Gabriel sit with him during any of the other hours as well—reading with him, or studying by his side on the sofa—Gabriel must come not one minute before the hour and he must leave (if he was to leave) at the sound of the chime. Gabriel thought this was all rather stupid and had not cared a jot for it at first; but whenever he _did_ appear in Castiel’s room at the wrong time, he found a cousin who was stubborn or awkward or silent, or one who glowered at him and would not let him sit down; and once, Castiel threw a book and shouted, and seemed actually about to cry, so that Gabriel turned up his nose and retreated quickly to his own rooms.

In his talks with Castiel, Gabriel had tried to be very cautious about the secret garden. There were certain things he wanted to find out, but he felt that he must find them out without asking direct questions. In the first place, as he began to like to be with Castiel, he wanted to discover whether he was the kind of boy you could tell a secret to. He was not in the least like Sam and Dean, but he was evidently so pleased with the idea of a garden no one knew anything about that Gabriel thought perhaps he could be trusted. But he had not known him long enough to be sure. The second thing he wanted to find out was this: If he could be trusted—if he _really_ could—wouldn’t it be possible to take him to the garden without having any one find it out? The grand doctor had said that he must have fresh air and Castiel had said that he would not mind fresh air in a secret garden. If gardens and fresh air had been good for Gabriel perhaps they would be good for Castiel. But then, if he hated people to look at him, perhaps he would not like to see Sam and Dean.

He asked Mary about it, over supper. She gave him one of her sharp looks, then she smiled.

“If anybody could talk her into it, lad,” she said, “tha’d be the one to do it. There’s not nothin’ like brothers for understandin’ one another.”

This reminded Gabriel of something he’d wondered about before. “Mary,” he said, “do you _always_ understand everything Sam says?”

Mary put down her knitting. “Well,” she said, “some times Dean follows him better, and some times I does. But there, I guess every family’s like that, one way or another. Dean’s with Sam ‘most every minute o’th’ day, tha’ knows, so he knows what he’s been lookin’ at an’ thinkin’ about, an’ there’s nobody like Dean for followin’ th’ way a body’s mind works even those as never say a word in all their life; but there’s some things a mother will always understand better than even the best of brothers.”

Gabriel thought about this as he ate; and after a minute, she added, “It wasna’ my boys that I meant, though. I were talkin’ about thee and the young missus.”

Gabriel gave her a puzzled look; and she shook her head, and clicked her tongue. “Did tha’ fathers never tell thee about th’ woman as gave birth t’ thee?”

“No,” said Gabriel, and all at once he sounded as distant and uncaring as ever he had done before he came to Misselthwaite. “They never told me anything about that sort of thing at all.”

“Did tha’ never think about it? Tha’ knowed that tha’ lawful parents canna be tha’ birth parents, man and man as they was?”

“Yes,” said Gabriel. “I never really thought about it. I suppose she was some woman under my fathers’ protection. They never told me.”

“Well,” said Mary, in a decided way, “not that it’s my place to tell thee, but I don’t approve of children not knowin’ all they like about where they come from. This world’s a moitherin’ place enow without buildin’ more secrets into it. Mrs. Shurley, she gave birth to twins. She kept th’ girl to hersel’, an’ her brother took th’ boy.”

“Her brother,” said Gabriel, quite confused. “Then I—then Mr. Shurley is my birth father?”

“There’s many women as does th’ same, when they finds thessel’s with more babes than they knows how to manage at once,” said Mary, “givin’ one or more over to by law to those of their family as doesn’t have any; and though _she_ could never have wanted for nurses, and nursery maids, and help of that kind, I always thought as she felt sorry for her brother, all alone over there in India with no real family to call his own. Cold, he was; and perhaps she thought as havin’ a child to love would change him for th’ better.”

Gabriel only stared at Mary without a word; and she sighed, and picked up a dropped stitch, and continued, “Well, and besides, she weren’t so strong herself, after that. Children is hard on a woman; an’ she took it hard, as some does. She come to bed too early, after th’ fall in th’ garden, an’ she were never quite right in the head after it. She kept on for some few months, an’ she doted on Claire, but she were a weak, sad creature. And then along came a fever, quiet-like, and carried her off in a day. Tha’ fathers wrote their condolences, but they never came back for the funeral. I think if they had Mr. Shurley might have had them take the girl as well; but there it is.”

“My fathers,” said Gabriel, in his most contrary way, “are very important— _were_ very important men. They were trusted with particular business by the _Government_. They could not simply—come and go as they liked, as if they were common people. They had no time for—for little matters.”

But even as he said that, he thought of the way Sam would throw his arms around his mother’s neck and kiss her cheek, and the way she pressed her arms around him and laughed. It suddenly seemed to him horribly unfair that it should be so, and that he should be a _little matter_ himself; and he felt a lump in his throat and a burning in his eyes, and he stared fiercely out of the window until it went away.

Mary said nothing; and after some time, Gabriel asked, “Does Castiel know about this?”

“So far as I can tell,” said she, “nobody never tells her nothin’ about her mother, nor about thee. She’s not really tha’ sister, o’ course—only by birth—but there, th’ master’s tha’ guardian now, which is as good as father in all but law. Tha’ mun tell her what tha’ likes. I daresay Mrs. Medlock won’t, and it’s not my place to do it for thee.”

On the next morning the sky was blue again. Gabriel wakened very early. The sun was pouring in slanting rays through the blinds and there was something so joyous in the sight of it that he jumped out of bed and ran to the window. He drew up the blinds and opened the window itself and a great waft of fresh, scented air blew in upon him. The moor was blue and the whole world looked as if something Magic had happened to it. There were tender little fluting sounds here and there and everywhere, as if scores of birds were beginning to tune up for a concert. Gabriel put his hand out of the window and held it in the sun.

It was warm.The little clouds were all pink, and Gabriel _knew_ all at once that the green points would be pushing up and up, and the roots would be working and struggling with all their might under the earth.

He scrambled to his feet and put on his clothes in five minutes. He ought to be taking breakfast with Castiel this morning, but he felt that he simply couldn’t wait—he _must_ go outside, and see the garden. Perhaps he would not have been quite so eager if he had not felt a little reluctant to see Castiel this morning. When he thought about what Mary had told him, it gave him a queer feeling inside. He had thought Sam and Dean very lucky to have each other, and he had wished that _he_ had a brother himself, but it was all rather strange to think about. And he did not like the thought of talking to Castiel while he must keep that _and_ the garden a secret; and besides, he was impatient with being told what to do and when to come as if he were one of the servants too.

He knew a small side door which he could unbolt himself and he flew downstairs in his socks and put on his boots in the hall. He unchained and unbolted and unlocked and when the door was open he sprang across the step with one bound, and there he was standing on the grass, which seemed to have turned green, and with the sun pouring down on him and warm sweet wafts about him and the fluting and twittering and singing coming from every bush and tree.

The long warm rain had done strange things to the herbaceous beds which bordered the walk by the lower wall. There were things sprouting and pushing out from the roots of clumps of plants and there were actually here and there glimpses of royal purple and yellow unfurling among the stems of crocuses. Six months before Master Gabriel would not have seen how the world was waking up, but now he missed nothing.

When he had reached the place where the door hid itself under the ivy, he was startled by a curious loud sound. It was the caw-caw of a crow and it came from the top of the wall, and when he looked up, there was Soot, peering down at him very wisely indeed. Gabriel was by this time quite accustomed to the bird, and even thought his glossy blue-black coat rather fine; and just now he was very happy to see him, because he was almost sure that Soot would not have come alone.

“Oh, it’s you!” he cried in a whisper, and he laughed. “Go and tell Sam and Dean that I am here!”

The crow sidled along the wall and winked at him, and shrugged his heavy shoulders. Then he spread his wings, and soared down into the garden beyond the wall, almost as if he had understood. And perhaps he had; for Gabriel had hardly pushed his way through the door before Sam came flying to meet him, with a healthy flush in his cheeks and his hair blowing loose in the morning breeze. He did not stop when he reached Gabriel: he hurtled straight into him and threw his arms around him as if it were the most natural thing in the world, laughing his silent laugh.

“You are here!” cried Gabriel, as Sam caught at his hand to draw him on. “I _am_ glad. How could you get here so early! How could you! The sun has only just got up!”

Soot had alighted on a dwarf apple-tree and under the apple-tree was lying a little reddish animal with a bushy tail; and there beside them was the stooping body and sandy head of Dean, who was kneeling on the grass working hard.

Dean got up himself, laughing and glowing, and tousled; his eyes bright as the fresh young grass around him.

“Eh!” he said. “We was up long before him.”

Sam shook his head, and began to sign with his hands—then all at once he pulled a face, and pushed open Gabriel’s coat so that he could tug out of his pocket the little pencil and notebook that he had not forgotten to bring.

_How could I have stayed abed!worlds all fair begun again this morning it has & its working & humming & scratching & piping and nestbuilding and breathing out scents til yous got to be out on it steado lying on your back. When sun did jump up moor went mad for joy & we was in the midst of the hether & I run like mad myself dancing & jumping & we come straight here. We couldnt have stayed away. garden was lying here waiting!_

Gabriel laughed aloud for happiness as he read the words that came tumbling from Sam’s pencil, almost as breathlessly as if they had been spoken. And the glow of Sam’s eyes and the wide delighted curve of his mouth made Gabriel feel like a person from the sulky lonely little child from India that he hugged Sam all at once, and even dropped a kiss on his hair as Dean did, before he could stop to think that he had never done such a thing in all his life before.

Seeing them talking to a stranger, the little bushy-tailed animal rose from its place under the tree and came to Sam.

“This is th’ little fox cub,” Dean said, rubbing the little reddish animal’s head. “It’s named Captain. Soot he flew across th’ moor with me an’ Captain he run same as if th’ hounds had been after him. They both felt same as _he_ did,” nodding to Sam as fondly as if he himself were above all such nonsense.

Neither of the creatures looked as if he were the least afraid of Gabriel. When Sam dragged Gabriel over to one of the garden beds, Soot flew down to ride on Sam’s shoulder, and Captain trotted quietly close to his side.

Sam made the sign _growing_ , and the sign for _see_ , and pointed to one place, and another, repeating _see_ with a laugh every two or three steps as if to say _look how these have pushed up! And these!_

They ran from one part of the garden to another and found so many wonders that they were obliged to remind themselves that they must whisper or speak low. Sam showed Gabriel swelling leafbuds on rose branches which had seemed dead. He showed him ten thousand new green points pushing through the mould. They put their eager young noses close to the earth and sniffed its warmed springtime breathing; they dug and pulled and laughed low with rapture until Master Gabriel’s hair was as tumbled as Sam’s and his cheeks were almost as red.

There was every joy on earth in the secret garden that morning, and in the midst of them came a delight more delightful than all, because it was more wonderful. Swiftly something flew across the wall and darted through the trees to a close grown corner, a little flare of red-breasted bird with something hanging from its beak. Dean stood quite still and put his hand on Gabriel almost as if they had suddenly found themselves laughing in a church.

“We munnot stir,” he whispered in broad Yorkshire. “We munnot scarce breathe. I knowed he was mate-huntin’ when I seed him last. It’s the robin. He’s buildin’ his nest. He’ll stay here if us don’t flight him.”

They settled down softly upon the grass and sat there without moving.

“Us mustn’t seem as if us was watchin’ him too close,” said Dean. “He’d be out with us for good if he got th’ notion us was interferin’ now. He’ll be a good bit different till all this is over. He’s settin’ up housekeepin’. He’ll be shyer an’ readier to take things ill. He’s got no time for visitin’ an’ gossipin’. Us must keep still a bit an’ try to look as if us was grass an’ trees an’ bushes. Then when he’s got used to seein’ us Sam’ll chirp a bit an’ he’ll know us’ll not be in his way.”

Master Gabriel was not at all sure that he knew how to try to look like grass and trees and bushes. But Sam and Dean only sat wonderfully still, and when Dean spoke dropped his voice to such a softness that it was curious that Gabriel could hear him, but he could.

“It’s part o’ th’ springtime, this nest-buildin’ is,” he said. “I warrant it’s been goin’ on in th’ same way every year since th’ world was begun. They’ve got their way o’ thinkin’ an’ doin’ things an’ a body had better not meddle. You can lose a friend in springtime easier than any other season if you’re too curious.”

“If we talk about him I can’t help looking at him,” Gabriel said as softly as possible. “We must talk of something else. There is something I want to tell you.”

“He’ll like it better if us talks o’ somethin’ else,” said Dean, and Sam sat up very straight and looked curious. “What is it tha’s got to tell us?”

“Well—do you know about Castiel—about Claire, that is?” he whispered.

Sam turned his head to look at Dean.

“What does tha’ know about her?” Dean asked carefully.

“I’ve seen him. He’s a boy really. I have been to talk to him every day this week. He wants me to come. He says I’m making him forget about being ill and dying,” answered Gabriel.

Dean looked actually relieved as soon as the surprise died away from his freckled face.

“I am glad o’ that,” he exclaimed. “I’m right down glad. It makes me easier. I knowed we must say nothin’ about Miss Claire an’ I don’t like havin’ to hide things.”

“How did you know about Castiel?” asked Gabriel.

“Everybody as knowed about Mester Shurley knowed there was a little lass as was like to be a cripple, an’ they knowed Mester Shurley didn’t like her to be talked about. Folks is sorry for Mester Shurley because Mrs. Shurley was such a pretty young lady an’ they was so fond of each other. How did tha’ find out about her?”

Gabriel told them his story about the midnight wuthering of the wind which had wakened him and about the faint far-off sounds of the complaining voice which had led him down the dark corridors with his candle and had ended with his opening of the door of the dimly lighted room with the carven four-posted bed in the corner, and how he had at first thought it was a girl in the bed until Castiel had told him otherwise. Sam leaned against Gabriel’s side, and listened with his eyes wide open and a pitying look on his face. When he described the small ivory-white face Dean shook his head.

“They say as Mester Shurley can’t bear to see her when she’s awake an’ it’s because her face is so like her mother’s an’ yet looks so different, because she were always laughin’ an’ the poor girl is always miserable, even when she’s sleepin’.”

Sam frowned, and signed a question at Dean.

“No, I don’t think she wants to die, but she—he wishes he’d never been born. Mother, she says that’s th’ worst thing on earth for a child. Them as is not wanted scarce ever thrives. Mester Shurley he’d buy anythin’ as money could buy for th’ poor lass but he’d like to forget as she’s on earth. For one thing, he’s afraid he’ll look at her some day and find she’s growed hunchback.”

“Castiel’s so afraid of it himself that he won’t sit up,” said Gabriel. “He says he’s always thinking that if he should feel a lump coming he should go crazy and cry himself to death.”

“Eh! he oughtn’t to lie there thinkin’ things like that,” said Dean. “No lad could get well as thought them sort o’ things.”

The fox was lying on the grass close by him, looking up to ask for a pat now and then, and Dean bent down and rubbed his neck softly and thought a few minutes in silence. Presently he lifted his head and looked round the garden.

“When first we got in here,” he said, “it seemed like everything was grey. Look round now and tell me if tha’ doesn’t see a difference.”

Gabriel looked and caught his breath a little.

“Why!” he cried, “the grey wall is changing. It is as if a green mist were creeping over it. It’s almost like a green gauze veil.”

“Aye,” said Dean. “An’ it’ll be greener and greener till th’ grey’s all gone. Can tha’ guess what I was thinkin’?”

“I know it was something nice,” said Gabriel eagerly. “I believe it was something about Castiel.”

“I was thinkin’ that if he was out here he wouldn’t be watchin’ for lumps to grow on his back; he’d be watchin’ for buds to break on th’ rose-bushes, an’ he’d likely be healthier,” explained Dean. “I was wonderin’ if us could ever get him in th’ humor to come out here an’ lie under th’ trees in his carriage.”

“I’ve been wondering that myself. I’ve thought of it almost every time I’ve talked to him,” said Gabriel. “I’ve wondered if he could keep a secret and I’ve wondered if we could bring him here without any one seeing us. I thought perhaps you could push his carriage. The doctor said he must have fresh air and if he wants us to take him out no one dare disobey him. He won’t go out for other people and perhaps they will be glad if he will go out with us. He could order the gardeners to keep away so they wouldn’t find out.”

Dean was thinking very hard as he scratched Captain’s back.

“It’d be good for him, I’ll warrant,” he said. “Us’d not be thinkin’ he’d better never been born. Us’d be just three children watchin’ a garden grow, an’ he’d be another. Four lads just lookin’ on at th’ springtime. I warrant it’d be better than doctor’s stuff.”

“He’s been lying in his room so long and he’s always been so afraid of his back that it has made him queer,” said Gabriel. “He knows a good many things out of books but he doesn’t know anything else. He says he has been too ill to notice things and he hates going out of doors and hates gardens and gardeners. But he likes to hear about this garden because it is a secret. I daren’t tell him much but he said he wanted to see it.”

“Us’ll have him out here sometime for sure,” said Dean. “I could push his carriage well enough. Has tha’ noticed how th’ robin an’ his mate has been workin’ while we’ve been sittin’ here? Look at him perched on that branch wonderin’ where it’d be best to put that twig he’s got in his beak.”

Sam made one of his low whistling calls and the robin turned his head and looked at him inquiringly, still holding his twig. Dean chuckled to himself, and his brother made a few low twitters and chirping noises with his tongue, as the robin cocked his head, and hopped, and flirted his tail, almost as if he understood.

“What are you saying to him?” whispered Gabriel breathlessly.

Sam giggled silently, even as he twittered, and signed with his hands.

“Wheres’ever tha’ puts it,” Dean said for him, “it’ll be all right. Tha’ knew how to build tha’ nest before tha’ came out o’ th’ egg. Get on with thee, lad. Tha’st got no time to lose.”

“Do you think he trusts us?” asked Gabriel.

“Aye, he knows us won’t trouble him,” Dean said, half to Gabriel and half to the robin. “Us is near bein’ wild things ourselves. Us is nest-buildin’ too, bless thee. Look out tha’ doesn’t tell on us.”

And though the robin did not answer, because his beak was occupied, Gabriel knew that when he flew away with his twig to his own corner of the garden the darkness of his dew-bright eye meant that he would not tell their secret for the world.

A little later, when they were working in different parts of the garden, Gabriel asked something that he had been wondering about for some time.

“Does he ever get it wrong,” he asked Sam, “what you mean to say?”

Sam sat back on his heels and rubbed his clever brown hands thoughtfully on his knees.

_Not often. Sometimes._

Gabriel did not know the sign for _sometimes_ , so Sam spelled it out for him with his fingers, and Gabriel copied it clumsily until he had it right. Then Sam gestured for the pencil and paper again.

_Sometimes he says what he thinks I meant to say or what I should have said. or he puts in words of his own as I wouldnta said. but most times it means something like, near enough._

“Don’t you get angry?” demanded Gabriel. “I know I should, if it were me. When I say a word, I mean it. I mean just that word, and no other. If anybody said a different word instead, I should hit them.”

Sam frowned, and gave him a queer look. Then he looked down at the earth, and at the little heap of roots like onions that he had gathered in front of his knees. He looked rather as if he were thinking things that made him feel a little ashamed.

 _Some times,_ Sam signed after a moment, with a little half-twist of a smile. Then he wrote, rather more slowly: _only I knows as hes doing as best he can. Some times I wants to scream, only I can’t. I wants to say things the way I thinks them, and not the way Dean does. But he’s a good brother and there’s not nobody as could do better for me._

“You ought keep the pencil and paper,” Gabriel decided. “I’ve lots more.”


	14. A tantrum

They found a great deal to do that morning and Gabriel was late in returning to the house and was also in such a hurry to get back to his work that he quite forgot Castiel until the last moment. In fact, the only reason he remembered at all was because the nurse came to his room, told him that Miss Claire was waiting for him.

“Tell him that I can’t come and see him yet,” Gabriel said to the nurse. “I’m very busy in the garden.”

The nurse looked rather worried.

“Eh! Master Gabriel,” she said, “it may put her all out of humour when I tell her that.”

But Gabriel was not a self-sacrificing person.

“I can’t stay,” he answered. “Dean’s waiting for me”; and he ran away.

The afternoon was even lovelier and busier than the morning had been. Already nearly all the weeds were cleared out of the garden and most of the roses and trees had been pruned or dug about. Dean had brought a spade of his own and he had taught Gabriel to use all his tools, so that by this time it was plain that though the lovely wild place was not likely to become a “gardener’s garden” it would be a wilderness of growing things before the springtime was over.

“There’ll be apple blossoms an’ cherry blossoms overhead,” Dean said, working away with all his might. “An’ there’ll be peach an’ plum trees in bloom against th’ walls, an’ th’ grass’ll be a carpet o’ flowers.”

The little fox and the rook were as happy and busy as they were, and the robin and his mate flew backward and forward like tiny streaks of lightning. Sometimes the rook flapped his black wings and soared away over the tree-tops in the park. Each time he came back and perched near Dean or Sam and cawed several times as if he were relating his adventures, and Sam talked to him just as he had talked to the robin. Once when Sam was so busy that he did not answer him at first, Soot flew on to his shoulders and gently tweaked his ear with his large beak. When Gabriel wanted to rest a little Sam sat down with him under a tree and once he took his pipe out of his pocket and played the soft strange little notes and two squirrels appeared on the wall and looked and listened.

“Tha’s a good bit stronger than tha’ was,” Dean said, looking over at them him as he was digging. “Tha’s beginning to look different, for sure.”

Gabriel was glowing with exercise and good spirits.

“I’m getting fatter and fatter every day,” he said quite exultantly. “Mrs. Medlock will have to get me some bigger clothes.”

The sun was beginning to set and sending deep gold-coloured rays slanting under the trees when they parted.

“It’ll be fine tomorrow,” said Dean; “us’ll be at work by sunrise.”

“So will I,” said Gabriel.

He ran back to the house as quickly as his feet would carry him. He wanted to tell Castiel about Dean’s fox cub and the crow and about what the springtime had been doing. He felt sure he would like to hear. So it was not very pleasant when he opened the door of his room, to see Mrs. Medlock standing waiting for him with a cross face.

“What is the matter?” he asked. “What did Claire say when I said I couldn’t come?”

“Eh!” said Mrs. Medlock, “I wish tha’d gone. She went into one of her sulks and hasn’t spoke a word all afternoon. She would watch the clock all th’ time.”

Gabriel’s lips pinched themselves together. He was no more used to considering other people than Castiel was and he saw no reason why an ill-tempered boy should interfere with the thing he liked best. When Gabriel had had a headache in India he had done his best to see that everybody else also had a headache or something quite as bad. And he felt he was quite right; but of course now he felt that Castiel was quite wrong.

Castiel was not on his sofa when Gabriel went into his room. He was lying flat on his back in bed and he did not turn his head toward Gabriel as he came in. This was a bad beginning and Gabriel marched up to him with his stiffest manner.

“Why didn’t you get up?” he said.

Castiel made no reply; only, he sniffed, and turned his head further toward the wall.

“Well,” said Gabriel decidedly, after a minute of silence, “ _I_ shan’t be sulky. I was working in the garden with Dean and Sam.”

Castiel pulled the blankets up over his head.

Gabriel turned up his nose, and sat himself down on the end of the bed with his boots upon the counterpane, and glared stubbornly at the lump.

After some minutes, Castiel popped one eye out over the top of his counterpane. “You’re still here,” he complained. “ _They_ always go away when I ignore them.”

“I’m not them,” declared Gabriel. “Besides, I think it makes you look stupid, just sitting there saying nothing at all like some kind of a _doll_.”

Castiel frowned and condescended to look at him.

“If you go and stay with Sam and Dean instead of coming to talk to me,” he said, “then they are upsetting the order of the day. I shan’t allow them to come here anymore if it happens again.”

“If you send them away, I’ll never come into this room again!” Gabriel retorted.

“You’ll have to if I want you,” said Castiel. “They shall drag you in.”

“Shall they, Mr. Rajah!” said Gabriel fiercely. “They may drag me in but they can’t make me talk when they get me here. I’ll sit and clench my teeth and never tell you one thing. I won’t even look at you. I’ll stare at the floor!”

They were a nice agreeable pair as they glared at each other. If they had been two little street boys they would have sprung at each other and had a rough-and-tumble fight. As it was, they did the next thing to it.

“You are a selfish thing!” cried Castiel, and hugged his pillow crossly.

“What are you?” said Gabriel. “Selfish people always say that. Any one is selfish who doesn’t do what they want. You’re more selfish than I am. You’re the most selfish boy I ever saw.”

“I’m not!” snapped Castiel, forgetting to be sulky. “I’m not as selfish as your common moor boys are! They keep you playing in the dirt together when they know I am all by myself. That’s selfish, if you like!”

Gabriel’s eyes flashed fire. “Better a common moor boy than a common Rajah!” he retorted.

Because he was the stronger of the two he was beginning to get the better of Castiel. The truth was that Castiel had never had a fight with any one like himself in his life and, upon the whole, it was rather good for him, though neither he nor Gabriel knew anything about that. He turned his head on his pillow and shut his eyes and scowled at nothing, as scruffy and discontented as anything you can imagine.

“I’m not as selfish as you, because I’m always ill, and I’m sure there is a lump coming on my back,” he grumbled. “And I am going to die besides.”

“You’re not!” contradicted Gabriel unsympathetically.

Castiel opened his eyes quite wide with indignation. He had never heard such a thing said before. He was at once furious and slightly pleased, if a person could be both at one time.

“Whatever do you mean?” he cried. “I am! You know I am! Everybody says so.”

“I don’t believe it!” said Gabriel sourly. “You just say that to make people sorry. I believe you’re proud of it. I don’t believe it!”

In spite of his invalid back Castiel sat up in bed in glowering indignation.

“I think you ought to _get out of the room_ ,” he said, as haughtily as you please; only he spoiled the effect of this dignity when Gabriel stuck out his tongue, and Castiel caught hold of his pillow and threw it at Gabriel. He was not strong enough to throw it far and it only fell onto the floor, but Gabriel’s face went flushed and indignant.

“I’m going,” he said. “And I won’t come back!”

He marched out of the door and closed it behind him, and there to his great astonishment he found Mary standing as if she had been listening and, more amazing still—she was laughing. Gabriel stood and gazed up at her as she stood giggling into her handkerchief.

“What are you laughing at?” he asked her.

“At you two young ‘uns,” said Mary. “It’s th’ best thing that could happen to th’ sickly pampered thing t’ have some one stand up t’ her that’s as spoiled as hessel’”; and she laughed into her handkerchief again. “If she’d had a scamp o’ a brother to fight with it would ha’ been th’ savin’ o’ her.”

Gabriel tossed his little head, and fixed his eyes on the nurse. “Is she going to die?” he demanded.

“I can’t see as why she should if only she’d make up her mind to the contrary,” said the nurse, rather as if she didn’t much care either way. “Hysterics and boredom are half what ails her.”

“What are hysterics?” asked Gabriel.

“Tha’ll find out if tha’ works her into a tantrum after this,” said Mary briskly. “It don’t happen often, more’s the blessin’, an’ I hasn’t seen it in a good three or four month. Mostly she jes’ goes all quiet, an’ glares, an’ sulks, an’ won’t eat for a day or so. But now an’ then out it just all comes burstin’, like she were a tree in a storm, an’ not a little lady. Tha’ jes’ keep thee away from her until mornin’ an’ let her cool down, there’s a good lad. An’ tonight’s my night off, so Sarah will bring tha’ supper.”

Gabriel went back to his room not feeling at all as he had felt when he had come in from the garden. He really did like Castiel; but he did not like being ordered to come and go as Castiel pleased, and it brought out all his old contrariness. He was cross and disappointed but not at all sorry for Castiel. He had looked forward to telling him a great many things and he had meant to try to make up his mind whether it would be safe to trust him with the great secret. He had been beginning to think it would be, but now he had changed his mind entirely. He would never tell him and he could stay in his room and never get any fresh air and die if he liked! It would serve him right! He felt so sour and unrelenting that for a few minutes he almost forgot about the green veil creeping over the world and the soft wind blowing down from the moor.

When he had sat and read a little, he soon began to forget that he was cross; and soon he grew quite interested in the story, which had pictures that looked very like the ship that he and Castiel had dreamed up the day before.

If he had been friends with Castiel he would have run to show him the book at once, and they would have looked at the pictures and read it together, and Castiel would have enjoyed himself so much he would never once have thought he was going to die or have put his hand on his spine to see if there was a lump coming. He had a way of doing that which Gabriel could not bear. It gave him an uncomfortable frightened feeling because Castiel always looked so frightened himself. He had never told any one but Gabriel that most of his “tantrums” as they called them grew out of his hysterical hidden fear. Gabriel had been sorry for him when he had heard this.

“He always began to think about it when he was cross or tired,” he said to himself. “And he has been cross today. Perhaps—perhaps he has been thinking about it all afternoon.”

He stood still, looking down at the carpet and thinking.

“I said I would never go back again—” he hesitated, knitting his brows—“but perhaps, just perhaps, I will go and see—if he wants me—in the morning. Perhaps he’ll try to throw his pillow at me again, but—I think—I’ll go.”

He had got up very early in the morning and had worked hard in the garden and he was tired and sleepy, so as soon as the maid had brought his supper and he had eaten it, he was glad to go to bed. As he laid his head on the pillow he murmured to himself:

“I’ll go out before breakfast and work with in the garden and then afterward—I believe—I’ll go to see him.”

He thought it was the middle of the night when he was awakened by such dreadful sounds that he jumped out of bed in an instant. What was it—what was it? The next minute he felt quite sure he knew. Doors were opened and shut and there were hurrying feet in the corridors and some one was crying and screaming at the same time, screaming and crying in a horrible way.

“It’s Castiel,” he thought. “He’s having one of those tantrums the nurse called hysterics. How awful it sounds.”

As he listened to the sobbing screams he did not wonder that people were so frightened that they gave him his own way in everything rather than hear them. He put his hands over his ears and felt sick and shivering. He wondered if Castiel would stop if he dared go to him and then he remembered how he had driven Gabriel out of the room. Perhaps the sight of him might make Castiel’s tantrum worse. Even when he pressed his hands more tightly over his ears he could not keep the awful sounds out. He hated them so and was so terrified by them that suddenly they began to make him angry and he felt as if he should like to fly into a tantrum herself and frighten Castiel as Castiel was frightening him. He was not used to any one’s tempers but his own. He could not help thinking of what Sam had said only that afternoon, of wishing that _he_ could scream and shout sometimes; but instead of making him feel sorry for Castiel, this only made him feel more angry. He took his hands from his ears and sprang up and stamped his foot.

“He ought to be stopped! Somebody ought to make him stop!” he cried out.

Just then he heard feet almost running down the corridor and his door opened and Mrs. Medlock came in. She was not cross now by any means. Her hair was all down around her ears, and she even looked rather pale.

“She’s worked herself into hysterics,” she said in a great hurry. “She’ll do herself harm. No one can do anything with her. You come and try, like a good boy. She likes you.”

“She turned me out of the room this afternoon,” said Gabriel, stamping his foot with excitement.

The stamp rather pleased Mrs. Medlock. The truth was that she had been afraid she might find Gabriel crying and hiding his head under the bedclothes.

“That’s right,” he said. “You’re in the right humour. You go and scold her. Give her something new to think of. Do go, child, as quick as ever you can.”

It was not until afterward that Gabriel realized that the thing had been funny as well as dreadful—that it was funny that all the grown-up people were so frightened that they came to a little boy just because they guessed he was almost as bad as Castiel himself.

He flew along the corridor and the nearer he got to the screams the higher his temper mounted. He felt quite wicked by the time he reached the door. He slapped it open with his hand and ran across the room to the four-posted bed.

“You stop!” he almost shouted. “You stop! I hate you! Everybody hates you! I wish everybody would run out of the house and let you scream yourself to death! You will scream yourself to death in a minute, and I wish you would!”

A nice sympathetic child could neither have thought nor said such things, but it just happened that the shock of hearing them was the best possible thing for this hysterical boy whom everybody stifled under the mantle of a “lady”, and fled from as soon as he tried to shake it off.

Castiel had been lying on his face beating his pillow with his hands and he actually almost jumped around, he turned so quickly at the sound of the furious little voice. His face looked dreadful, white and red and swollen, and he was gasping and choking; but savage little Gabriel did not care an atom.

“If you scream another scream,” he said, “I’ll scream too—and I can scream louder than you can and I’ll frighten you, I’ll frighten you!”

Castiel actually had stopped screaming because he had startled him so. The scream which had been coming almost choked him. The tears were streaming down his face and he shook all over.

“I can’t stop!” he gasped and sobbed. “I can’t—I can’t!”

“You can!” shouted Gabriel. “Half that ails you is hysterics and boredom—just hysterics—hysterics—hysterics!” and he stamped each time he said it.

“I felt the lump—I felt it,” choked out Castiel. “I knew I should. I shall have a hunch on my back and then I shall die,” and he began to sob again.

“You didn’t feel a lump!” contradicted Gabriel fiercely. “If you did it was only a hysterical lump. Hysterics makes lumps. There’s nothing the matter with your horrid back—nothing but hysterics! Turn over and let me look at it!”

He liked the word _hysterics_ and felt somehow as if it had an effect on Castiel. Castiel was probably like Gabriel himself and had never heard it before.

“Nurse,” Gabriel commanded, “come here and show me his back this minute!”

The nurse and Mrs. Medlock had been standing huddled together near the door staring at him, their mouths half open. Both had gasped with fright more than once. The nurse came forward as if she were half afraid. Castiel was heaving with great breathless sobs.

“Perhaps she—she won’t let me,” she hesitated in a low voice, and threw a doubtful look at Mrs. Medlock.

Castiel heard her, however, and he gasped out between two sobs:

“Sh-show him! He—he’ll see then!”

It was a poor thin back to look at when it was bared. Every rib could be counted and every joint of the spine, though Master Gabriel did not count them as he bent over and examined them with a sarcastic little face. There was just a minute’s silence, for even Castiel tried to hold his breath while Gabriel looked up and down his spine, and down and up, as intently as if he had been the great doctor from London.

“There’s not a single lump there!” he said at last. “There’s not a lump as big as a pin—except backbone lumps, and you can only feel them because you’re thin. I’ve got backbone lumps myself, and they used to stick out as much as yours do, until I began to get fatter, and I am not fat enough yet to hide them. There’s not a lump as big as a pin! If you ever say there is again, I shall laugh!”

No one but Castiel himself knew what effect those crossly spoken childish words had on him. If he had ever had any one to talk to about his secret terrors—if he had ever dared to let himself ask questions—if he had had childish companions and had not lain on his back in the huge closed house, breathing an atmosphere heavy with the fears of people who were most of them ignorant and tired of him, he would have found out that most of his fright and illness was created by himself. But he had lain and thought of himself and his aches and weariness for hours and days and months and years. And now that an angry unsympathetic little boy insisted obstinately that he was not as ill as he thought he was he actually felt as if he might be speaking the truth.

“I didn’t know,” ventured the nurse, “that she thought she had a lump on her spine. Her back is weak because she won’t try to sit up. I could have told her there was no lump there.”

Castiel gulped and turned his face a little to look at her.

“C-could you?” he said.

“Yes, miss.”

“So there!” said Gabriel, and he gulped too.

Castiel turned on his face again and but for his long-drawn broken breaths, which were the dying down of his storm of sobbing, he lay still for a minute, though great tears streamed down his face and wet the pillow. Actually the tears meant that a curious great relief had come to him. Presently he turned and looked at the nurse again and strangely enough he was not like a Rajah at all as he spoke to her.

“Do you think—I could—live to grow up?” he said.

The nurse was neither clever nor soft-hearted but she could repeat some of the London doctor’s words.

“You probably will if you will do what you are told to do, and stay out a great deal in the fresh air.”

Castiel’s tantrum had passed and he was weak and worn out with crying and this perhaps made him feel gentle. He put out his hand a little toward Gabriel, and I am glad to say that, Gabriel’s own tantrum having passed, he was softened too and met Castiel half-way with his hand, so that it was a sort of making up.

“I’ll—I’ll go out with you, Gabriel,” he said. “I shan’t hate fresh air if we can find—” He remembered just in time to stop himself from saying “if we can find the secret garden” and he ended, “I shall like to go out with you if Dean will come and push my chair. I do so want to see Dean and Sam and the fox and the crow.”

The nurse remade the tumbled bed and shook and straightened the pillows. Then she made Castiel a cup of beef tea and gave a cup to Gabriel, who really was very glad to get it after his excitement. Mrs. Medlock gladly slipped away, and after everything was neat and calm and in order the nurse looked as if she would very gladly slip away also. She was a healthy young woman who resented being robbed of her sleep and she yawned quite openly as she looked at Gabriel, who had pushed his big footstool close to the four-posted bed and was holding Castiel’s hand.

“You must go back and get your sleep out,” she said. “She’ll drop off after a while—if she’s not too upset. Then I’ll lie down myself in the next room.”

“Would you like me to sing you that song I learned from my Ayah?” Gabriel whispered to Castiel.

Castiel’s hand pulled Gabriel’s gently and he turned his tired eyes on him appealingly.

“Oh, yes!” he answered. “It’s such a soft song. I shall go to sleep in a minute.”

“I will put him to sleep,” Gabriel said to the yawning nurse. “You can go if you like.”

“Well,” said the nurse, with an attempt at reluctance. “If he doesn’t go to sleep in half an hour you must call me.”

“Very well,” answered Gabriel.

The nurse was out of the room in a minute and as soon as he was gone Castiel pulled Gabriel’s hand again.

“I almost told,” he said; “but I stopped myself in time. I won’t talk and I’ll go to sleep, but you said you had a whole lot of nice things to tell me.”

Gabriel hesitated for a moment, but then he began to talk. He told Castiel about green spikes opening up into leaves, and early bluebells, and little swelling buds on grey branches. He told him about Captain, and about the way Soot had of pulling slyly on Dean’s hair when Dean was least expecting it, until Dean cursed and called him an impudent pigeon. He told him about the robin and his nest, and the worms that Gabriel had dug up that afternoon and left just where he’d known the robin would find them, and about the robin darting down as soon as he turned away to gather them up; and how he had fluttered down after that to perch almost as near to Sam as usual, to twitter back and forth with him.

“Does he really understand everything Sam says?” Castiel asked.

“It seems as if he does,” answered Gabriel. “Sam says anything will understand if you’re friends with it for sure, but you have to be friends for sure.”

Castiel lay quiet a little while and his strange blue eyes seemed to be staring at the wall, but Gabriel saw he was thinking.

“I wish I was friends with things,” he said at last, “but I’m not. I never had anything to be friends with, and I can’t bear people.”

“Can’t you bear me?” asked Gabriel.

“Yes, I can,” he answered. “It’s funny but I even like you. Do you—do you think my father will ever like me enough to visit me while I am awake?”

“How can he like you if he never meets you?” retorted Gabriel. “ _I_ think he is a coward. I think that _you_ ought to go in there in your chair and visit _him_.”

Castiel blinked his big, sad eyes at Gabriel. For a moment he looked perplexed—then he giggled, and looked startled at himself, and covered his mouth with his hand.

“Have you,” he said—“do you think you have found out anything at all about the way into the secret garden?”

Gabriel looked at his poor little tired face and swollen eyes and his heart relented.

“Ye-es,” he answered, “I think I have. And if you will go to sleep I will tell you tomorrow.”

Castiel squeezed his hand, almost as if he were strong.

“If I could get into it,” he said “I think I should live to grow up! Do you suppose that instead of singing the Ayah song—you could just tell me softly as you did that first day what you imagine it looks like inside? I am sure it will make me go to sleep.”

“Yes,” answered Gabriel. “Shut your eyes.”

Castiel closed his eyes and lay quite still and Gabriel held his hand and began to speak very slowly and in a very low voice.

“I think it has been left alone so long—that it has grown all into a lovely tangle. I think the roses have climbed and climbed and climbed until they hang from the branches and walls and creep over the ground-almost like a strange grey mist. Some of them have died but many are alive and when the summer comes there will be curtains and fountains of roses. I think the ground is full of daffodils and snowdrops and lilies and iris working their way out of the dark. Now the spring has begun—perhaps—perhaps—”

The soft drone of his voice was making Castiel stiller and stiller and Gabriel saw it and went on.

“Perhaps they are coming up through the grass—perhaps there are clusters of purple crocuses and gold ones—even now. Perhaps the leaves are beginning to break out and uncurl-and perhaps-the grey is changing and a green gauze veil is creeping—and creeping over-everything. And the birds are coming to look at it—because it is—so safe and still. And perhaps—perhaps—perhaps—” very softly and slowly indeed, “the robin’s mate, and the robin’s nest, and _our_ nest—perhaps they are in there, in the garden.”

And Castiel was asleep.


	15. "Can I trust you - for sure?"

Of course Gabriel did not waken early the next morning. He slept late because he was tired, and when Mary brought his breakfast she told him that though Claire was quite quiet she was ill and feverish as she always was after she had worn herself out with a fit of crying. Gabriel ate his breakfast slowly as he listened.

“She says she wishes tha’ would please go and see her as soon as tha’ can,” Mary said. “It’s queer what a fancy she’s took to thee. Tha’ did give it her last night for sure, they do say. I’m that there glad o’ it. Nobody else would have dared to do it. Eh! poor lass! She’s been spoiled till salt won’t save her. Th’ two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have her own way—or always to have it. But she says to me when I went into her room, ‘Please ask Master Gabriel if he’ll please come an’ talk to me?’ Think o’ her saying please! Will you go, lad?”

“I’ll run and see your boys first,” said Gabriel. “No, I’ll go and see Castiel first and tell him—I know what I’ll tell him,” with a sudden inspiration.

He had his hat on when he appeared in Castiel’s room and for a second Castiel looked disappointed. He was in bed. His face was sickly white and there were dark circles round his eyes.

“I’m glad you came,” Castiel said. “My head aches and I ache all over because I’m so tired. Are you going somewhere?”

Gabriel went and leaned against Castiel’s bed.

“I won’t be long,” he said. “I’m going to Dean and Sam, but I’ll come back. Castiel, it’s—it’s something about the garden.”

Castiel’s whole face brightened and a little colour came into it.

“Oh! is it?” he cried out. “I dreamed about it all night. I heard you say something about grey changing into green, and I dreamed I was standing in a place all filled with trembling little green leaves—and there were birds on nests everywhere and they looked so soft and still. I’ll lie and think about it until you come back.”

 

 

The garden had reached the time when every day and every night it seemed as if magicians were passing through it drawing loveliness out of the earth and the boughs with wands. It was hard to go away and leave it all, particularly as Nut had actually crept on to Gabriel’s boot and Shell had scrambled down the trunk of the apple-tree they sat under and stayed there looking at him with inquiring eyes—and Dean and Sam had brought with them a new-born lamb, which they had rescued on the moor.

A new-born lamb!

But Gabriel went back to the house and when he sat down close to Castiel’s bed Castiel began to sniff at the air as Dean did, though not in such an experienced way.

“You smell like—like fresh things,” he said, frowning at Gabriel in an inquisitive sort of a way. “What is it you smell of? It’s cool and warm and sweet all at the same time.”

“It’s th’ wind from th’ moor,” said Gabriel. “It comes o’ sittin’ on th’ grass under a tree wi’ Dean an’ wi’ Sam an’ Captain an’ Soot an’ Nut an’ Shell. It’s th’ springtime an’ out o’ doors an’ sunshine as smells so graidely.”

He said it as broadly as he could, and you do not know how broadly Yorkshire sounds until you have heard some one speak it. Castiel blinked at him, and wrinkled up his face, and looked imperious.

“What are you doing?” he said. “I never heard you talk like that before. How funny it sounds.”

“I’m givin’ thee a bit o’ Yorkshire,” answered Gabriel triumphantly. “I canna’ talk as graidely as Dean an’ Mary can but tha’ sees I can shape a bit. Doesn’t tha’ understand a bit o’ Yorkshire when tha’ hears it? An’ tha’ a Yorkshire lad thysel’ bred an’ born! Eh! I wonder tha’rt not ashamed o’ thy face.”

And then he began to laugh too and they both laughed until they could not stop themselves and they laughed until the room echoed and Mrs. Medlock opening the door to come in drew back into the corridor and stood listening amazed.

“Well, upon my word!” she said, speaking rather broad Yorkshire himself because there was no one to hear her and she was so astonished. “Whoever heard th’ like! Whoever on earth would ha’ thought it!”

When they could speak again, Gabriel told Castiel all about how the world looked outside that morning, and what he had done already in just the hour he head been out. Gabriel had run round into the wood with Sam to see Jump. He was a tiny little shaggy moor pony with thick locks hanging over his eyes and with a pretty face and a nuzzling velvet nose. He was rather thin with living on moor grass but he was as tough and wiry as if the muscle in his little legs had been made of steel springs. He had lifted his head and whinnied softly the moment he saw Sam and he had trotted up to them and put his head across Sam’s shoulder and then Sam had talked into his ear and Jump had talked back in odd little whinnies and puffs and snorts. Sam had made him give Gabriel his small front hoof and kiss him on his cheek with his velvet muzzle.

Talking of the moor made Castiel sit up almost straight, and stare out of the window.

“Just you wait,” said Gabriel, trying to tumble his words out as Dean did, “till you see th’ gold-coloured gorse blossoms an’ th’ blossoms o’ th’ broom, an’ th’ heather flowerin’, all purple bells, an’ hundreds o’ butterflies flutterin’ an’ bees hummin’ an’ skylarks soarin’ up an’ singin’. You’ll want to get out on it at sunrise an’ live out on it all day like Dean and Sam does.”

“Could I ever get there?” asked Castiel wistfully, looking through her window at the far-off blue. It was so new and big and wonderful and such a heavenly colour.

“I don’t know,” answered Gabriel. “Tha’s never used tha’ legs since tha’ was born, it seems.”

Castiel scowled at him at once, until he saw that Gabriel was halfway to laughing; and then he laughed too, and poked at his legs through the blanket.

Quite suddenly it came into Gabriel’s mind that this was the minute to tell him. He got up from his stool and came to him and caught hold of both his hands.

“Can I trust you? I trusted Dean and Sam because birds trusted them. Can I trust you—for sure—for sure?” he implored.

His face was so solemn that Castiel almost whispered his answer.

“Yes—yes!”

“Well, Dean and Sam will come to see you this morning, and they’ll bring the creatures with them.”

“Oh! Oh!” Castiel cried out in delight.

Gabriel ran to the window, and gave a signal; and when he saw Sam’s little face pop up from behind a little hedge, and caught his cheerful wave back, he knew they were coming.

“But that’s not all,” Gabriel went on, turning back to Castiel, almost pale with solemn excitement. “The rest is better. There is a door into the garden. I found it. It is under the ivy on the wall.”

If he had been a strong healthy boy Castiel would probably have shouted “Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!” but he was weak, and his eyes grew bigger and bigger and he gasped for breath.

“Oh! Shall I see it?” he cried out, and seized at his bed sheets. “Shall I get into it? Shall I live to get into it?” and he clutched Gabriel’s hands and dragged him toward himself.

“Of course you’ll see it!” snapped Gabriel indignantly. “Of course you’ll live to get into it! Don’t be silly!”

And he was so un-hysterical and natural and childish that he brought Castiel to his senses, and Castiel began to laugh at himself, and a few minutes afterward Gabriel was sitting on his stool again telling Castiel not what he imagined the secret garden to be like but what it really was, and Castiel’s aches and tiredness were forgotten and he was listening enraptured.

“It is just what you thought it would be,” he said at last. “It sounds just as if you had really seen it. You know I said that when you told me first.”

Gabriel hesitated about two minutes and then boldly spoke the truth.

“I had seen it—and I had been in,” he said. “I found the key and got in weeks ago. But I daren’t tell you—I daren’t because I was so afraid I couldn’t trust you—for sure!”

Castiel looked a little alarmed. “Nobody has ever trusted me before,” he said. “I don’t know if—what if I do something wrong? What if you find me tiresome and decide to leave, like all the nurses do?”

“Well, I shan’t,” said Gabriel decidedly. Then he held up his hand.“Listen!” he said. “Did you hear a caw?”

Castiel listened and heard it, the oddest sound in the world to hear inside a house, a hoarse “caw-caw”.

“Yes,” he answered.

“That’s Soot,” said Gabriel. “Listen again. Do you hear a bleat—a tiny one?”

“Oh, yes!” cried Castiel, quite flushing.

“That’s the new-born lamb,” said Gabriel. “They’re coming.”

Dean’s moorland boots were thick and clumsy and though he tried to walk quietly they made a clumping sound as he walked through the long corridors. Sam’s softer feet patter-pattered in double time to his brothers, and Gabriel and Castiel heard Dean marching—marching, until he passed through the tapestry door on to the soft carpet of Castiel’s own passage.

“If you please, miss,” announced Mary, opening the door, “here’s Dean, an’ Sam an’ his creatures.”

Dean came in and nodded his no-nonsense greeting. Sam peeped from behind his shoulder, beaming his widest and proudest beam. The new-born lamb was in his arms and the little red fox trotted by their side. Nut sat on Sam’s left shoulder and Soot on his right and Shell’s head and paws peeped out of Dean’s coat pocket.

Castiel slowly sat up and stared and stared—as he had stared when he first saw Gabriel—but this was a stare of wonder and delight. The truth was that in spite of all he had heard he had not in the least understood what these boys would be like and that Sam’s fox and his crow and his squirrels and his lamb were so near to him and his friendliness that they seemed almost to be part of himself. Castiel had never talked to a boy in his life except Gabriel, and he was so overwhelmed by his own pleasure and curiosity that he did not even think of speaking.

But Sam did not feel the least shy or awkward. He had not felt embarrassed because the crow had not known his language and had only stared and had not spoken to him the first time they met. Creatures were always like that until they found out about you. He walked over to Castiel’s sofa and put the new-born lamb quietly on his lap, and immediately the little creature turned to the warm velvet dressing-gown and began to nuzzle and nuzzle into its folds and butt its tight-curled head with soft impatience against his side. Of course no boy could have helped speaking then.

“What is it doing?” cried Castiel. “What does it want?”

“It wants its mother,” said Dean, smiling. “We brought it to thee a bit hungry because I knowed tha’d like to see it feed.”

Sam knelt down by the sofa and took a feeding-bottle from his pocket, and coaxed the small woolly white head with a gentle brown hand.

“This is what tha’s after,” said Dean, almost under his breath, as though his words were Sam’s, although Sam’s hands were busy. “Tha’ll get more out o’ this than tha’ will out o’ silk velvet coats. There now.” And Sam pushed the rubber tip of the bottle into the nuzzling mouth and the lamb began to suck it with ravenous ecstasy.

After that there was no wondering what to say. By the time the lamb fell asleep questions poured forth and Dean and Sam answered them all. They told how they had found the lamb just as the sun was rising three mornings ago. They had been standing on the moor listening to a skylark and watching him swing higher and higher into the sky until he was only a speck in the heights of blue.

“I’d lost him but for his song an’ I was wonderin’ how Sam could hear it when it seemed as if he’d get out o’ th’ world in a minute—an’ just then Sam looked aside, like as if he’d heard somethin’ else far off among th’ gorse bushes. An’ he says to me, ‘doesna tha’ hear it, cryin’ an’ clemmin’?’ An’ when us goes to look, I heared a weak bleatin’ an’ I knowed it was a new lamb as was hungry an’ I knowed it wouldn’t be hungry if it hadn’t lost its mother somehow, so I set off searchin’. Eh! we did have a look for it. I went in an’ out among th’ gorse bushes an’ round an’ round an’ I always seemed to take th’ wrong turnin’. But at last Sam seed a bit o’ white by a rock on top o’ th’ moor an’ I climbed up an’ found th’ little ‘un half dead wi’ cold.”

While he talked, Soot flew solemnly in and out of the open window and cawed remarks about the scenery while Nut and Shell made excursions into the big trees outside and ran up and down trunks and explored branches. Captain curled up near Dean, who sat on the hearth-rug from preference. Sam sat cross-legged and comfortable on Castiel’s bed with him, and Gabriel kept to his accustomed stool.

Once, Sam found Castiel looking at him curiously, and gave him a look that seemed to ask the reason why.

“You’re a boy,” said Castiel. “Why do you have your hair so long?”

Sam laughed in the way that made Gabriel want to laugh with him, where his face crinkled up and his eyes went bright, and he ducked his head forward so that his hair fell all around his face.

“He likes it that way,” said Dean. “He won’ let me cut it shorter. He likes it hangin’ all about his ears like a mess o’ wool snagged on a thorn.”

“Oh,” said Castiel; and he pushed his own long plaits back over his shoulder with a thoughtful scowl.

They looked at the pictures in the gardening books and Dean knew all the flowers by their country names and knew exactly which ones were already growing in the secret garden.

“I couldna’ say that there name,” he said, pointing to one under which was written “Aquilegia,” “but us calls that a columbine, an’ that there one it’s a snapdragon and they both grow wild in hedges, but these is garden ones an’ they’re bigger an’ grander. There’s some big clumps o’ columbine in th’ garden. They’ll look like a bed o’ blue an’ white butterflies flutterin’ when they’re out.”

“I’m going to see them,” cried Castiel. “I am going to see them!”

“Aye, that tha’ mun,” said Gabriel quite seriously. “An’ tha’ munnot lose no time about it.”

Sam looked at him and grinned broadly, as he always did when Gabriel tried to talk Yorkshire. Then they saw Dr. Shurley in the door and stopped. Gabriel became quite still and Castiel all at once looked fretful and quiet; and Dean became very watchful, looking with knowing eyes between Castiel and the doctor. Only Sam seemed quite unconcerned, and gave the newcomer a merry smile.

“I am sorry to hear you were ill last night, my girl,” Dr. Shurley said a trifle nervously, looking around at all the animals. He was rather a nervous man.

“I’m better now—much better,” Castiel answered earnestly. “I’m going out in my chair today. It is a very fine day, and I want some fresh air.”

As there had been occasions when this same young lady had shrieked aloud with rage and had insisted that fresh air would give her cold and kill her, it is not to be wondered at that the doctor felt somewhat startled.

“I thought you did not like fresh air,” he said.

“I don’t when I am by myself,” replied Castiel; “but my cousin is going out with me.”

“And the nurse, of course?” suggested Dr. Shurley.

“No, I will not have the nurse,” so magnificently that Gabriel could not help remembering how the young native Prince had looked with his diamonds and emeralds and pearls stuck all over him and the great rubies on the small dark hand he had waved to command his servants to approach with salaams and receive his orders. “My cousin knows how to take care of me. I am always better when he is with me. He made me better last night. Dean will push my carriage.”

Dr. Shurley felt rather alarmed. If this tiresome hysterical girl should chance to get well he himself would lose all chance of inheriting Misselthwaite; but he was not an unscrupulous man, though he was a weak one, and he did not intend to let her run into actual danger.

“Well, well,” the doctor said. “If it amuses you perhaps it won’t do you any harm. Did you take your bromide last night, Miss Claire?”

“No,” Castiel answered. “I wouldn’t take it at first and after Gabriel made me quiet he talked me to sleep—in a low voice—about the spring creeping into a garden.”

“That sounds soothing,” said Dr. Shurley, more perplexed than ever and glancing sideways at Master Gabriel sitting on his stool. “You are evidently better, but you must remember—”

“I don’t want to remember,” interrupted the Rajah, appearing again. “When I lie by myself and remember I begin to have pains everywhere and I think of things that make me begin to scream because I hate them so. If there was a doctor anywhere who could make you forget you were ill instead of remembering it I would have him brought here.” And he waved a thin hand which ought really to have been covered with royal signet rings made of rubies. “It is because my cousin makes me forget that he makes me better.”

“We’ll try the experiment,” said the doctor, with his slight nervousness, and a nod to the boy standing on the hearth-rug. “Dean’s a lad I’d trust with a new-born child.”

“Gabriel,” said Castiel, turning to him, “what is that thing you say in India when you have finished talking and want people to go?”

“You say, ‘You have my permission to go,’ ” answered Gabriel.

The Rajah waved his hand.

“You have my permission to go, doctor,” he said.

“Caw—Caw!” remarked the crow hoarsely but not impolitely.

Dr. Shurley had never made such a short stay after a “tantrum”; usually he was obliged to remain a very long time and do a great many things. This morning he did not give any medicine or leave any new orders and he was spared any disagreeable scenes. On the whole he was rather pleased; but he had a long whispered conversation with Mrs. Medlock in the corridor, and agreed to return on the next morning.

When the doctor was gone, Dean crossed his arms over his chest, and leaned against the wardrobe in his half-hidden corner, and looked much wiser and older than any of them.

Castiel scowled at him, and crossed his own arms, and looked as stubborn as he possible could.

“What are you looking at me for?” Castiel said.

“Only thinkin’,” said Dean, “as how I might feel almost sorry for Dr. Shurley.”

“So am I,” said Castiel calmly, but not without an air of some satisfaction. “He won’t get Misselthwaite at all now I’m not going to die.”

Dean grinned a little, and shrugged his shoulders. “I woulda hated t’ have to be polite for ten year to a lad as was always as rude as tha’ art. If it was me, I’d never ha’ done it.”

Castiel sat bolt upright in the bed, and stared at Dean with indignation—then, after a moment, with curiosity.

“Am I rude?” Castiel inquired.

Dean tipped his head to one side. “If tha’d been his own boy, an’ he’d been a slappin’ sort o’ a man, he’da slapped thee.”

“But he daren’t,” said Castiel.

“No,” answered Dean; and his grin only grew wider. “Tha’s th’ _lady_ o’ the house, while tha’ father’s away. He daren’t.”

Castiel tossed his head in a way he had learned from Gabriel, and frowned his annoyance; but he looked very thoughtful all the same.

The strongest footman in the house carried Castiel downstairs and put him in his wheeled chair. After the manservant had arranged his rugs and cushions the Rajah waved his hand to him and to the nurse.

“You have my permission to go,” he said, and they both disappeared quickly and (it must be confessed) giggled when they were safely inside the house.

Dean began to push the wheeled chair slowly and steadily. Sam and Master Gabriel walked beside it and Castiel leaned back and lifted his face to the sky. The arch of it looked very high and the small snowy clouds seemed like white birds floating on outspread wings below its crystal blueness. The wind swept in soft big breaths down from the moor and was strange with a wild clear-scented sweetness. Castiel kept lifting his thin chest to draw it in, and his big eyes looked as if it were they which were listening, instead of his ears.

“There are so many sounds of singing and humming and calling out,” he said. “What is that scent the puffs of wind bring?”

“It’s gorse on th’ moor that’s openin’ out,” answered Dean. “Th’ bees are at it wonderful today.”

Not a human creature was to be caught sight of in the paths they took. Just to be safe, they wound in and out among the shrubbery and out and round the fountain beds before they approached the long walk by the ivied walls. But when they turned into the walk the excited sense of an approaching thrill made them, for some curious reason they could not have explained, begin to speak in whispers.

“This is it,” breathed Gabriel. “This is where I used to walk up and down and wonder and wonder.”

“Is it?” cried Castiel, and his eyes began to search the ivy with eager curiousness. “But I can see nothing,” he whispered. “There is no door.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Gabriel.

Then there was a lovely breathless silence and the chair wheeled on.

“That is the kitchen garden where I used to play in the trees,” said Gabriel.

“Is it?” said Castiel.

A few yards more and Gabriel whispered again.

“This is where the robin flew over the wall,” he said.

“Oh!” cried Castiel. “I wish he’d come again!”

“And that,” said Gabriel with solemn delight, pointing under a big lilac bush, “is where he perched on the little heap of earth and showed me the key.”

Then Castiel sat up.

“Where? Where? There?” he cried, and his eyes were as big as the wolf’s in Red Riding-Hood, when Red Riding-Hood felt called upon to remark on them. Dean stood still and the wheeled chair stopped.

“And this,” said Gabriel, stepping on to the bed close to the ivy, “is where I went to talk to him when he chirped at me from the top of the wall. And this is the ivy the wind blew back,” and he took hold of the hanging green curtain.

“Oh! is it—is it!” gasped Castiel.

“And here is the handle, and here is the door. Dean push him in—push him in quickly!”

And Dean did it with one strong, steady push.

Castiel had actually dropped back against his cushions, even though he gasped with delight, and he had covered his eyes with his hands and held them there shutting out everything until they were inside and the chair stopped as if by magic and the door was closed. Not till then did he take them away and look round and round and round as Dean and Gabriel had done. And the sun fell warm upon his face like a hand with a lovely touch. And in wonder Gabriel and Dean stood and stared at him. He looked so strange and different because a pink glow of colour had actually crept all over him—ivory face and neck and hands and all.

“I shall get well! I shall get well!” he cried out. “Gabriel! Sam! Dean, I shall get well! And I shall live forever and ever and ever!”

It was a magical afternoon in that garden, and only seemed too short to the eager young spirits that thrived there. Dean pushed Castiel from one part of the garden to another, and Gabriel and Sam chattered over each other in whispers and signs about what they had planted, and what they planned, until at last Castiel had to sit and rest in the sun while the others dug and played and laughed around him, and the breeze coaxed his hair out of their neat plaits strand by strand.

When it was time to go back inside, Castiel sat up and looked around him with wide eyes, as if he were drinking in everything one last time to store it up overnight.

“You’ll come back tomorrow, won’t you?” he said to Dean, a little anxious. “We can do this again?”

“Ev’ry day, if tha’ wants us,” said Dean; and he combed out Castiel’s wild hair with gentle fingers, and began to weave it up again into sturdy rough plaits.

Castiel leaned his head into the touch, and closed his eyes, and smiled. “I’ve seen the spring now and I’m going to see the summer,” said he, determined. “I’m going to see everything grow here. I’m going to grow here myself.”

“That tha’ will,” said Dean. “Us’ll have thee walkin’ about here an’ diggin’ same as other folk afore long.”

Castiel flushed tremendously.

“Walk!” he said. “Dig! Shall I?”

Dean’s glance at Gabriel was delicately cautious. None of them had asked if anything was the matter with Castiel’s legs.

“For sure tha’ will,” he said stoutly. “Tha—tha’s got legs o’ thine own, same as other folks!”

Gabriel was rather frightened until he heard Castiel’s answer.

“Nothing really ails them,” he said, “but they are so thin and weak. They shake so that I’m afraid to try to stand on them.”

Both Gabriel and Dean drew a relieved breath.

“When tha’ stops bein’ afraid tha’lt stand on ‘em,” Dean said with renewed cheer. “An’ tha’lt stop bein’ afraid in a bit.”

“I shall?” said Castiel, and he sat still as if he were wondering about things.


	16. "I shall call you my brother."

Oh! the things which happened in that garden in the months that followed—the wonderful months—the radiant months—the amazing ones! If you have never had a garden you cannot understand, and if you have had a garden you will know that it would take a whole book to describe all that came to pass there.

At first it seemed that green things would never cease pushing their way through the earth, in the grass, in the beds, even in the crevices of the walls. Then the green things began to show buds and the buds began to unfurl and show colour, every shade of blue, every shade of purple, every tint and hue of crimson.

In the garden’s happy days flowers had been tucked away into every inch and hole and corner of the walls. Dean knew how it was done, and showed them how to scrape out mortar from between the bricks and made pockets of earth for lovely clinging things to grow on. Iris and white lilies rose out of the grass in sheaves, and the green alcoves filled themselves with amazing armies of the blue and white flower lances of tall delphiniums or columbines or campanulas.

Castiel saw it all, watching each change as it took place. Every morning he was brought out and every hour of each day when it didn’t rain he spent in the garden. Even grey days pleased him. He would lie on the grass “watching things growing,” he said. If you watched long enough, he declared, you could see buds unsheathe themselves. Also you could make the acquaintance of strange busy insect things running about on various unknown but evidently serious errands, sometimes carrying tiny scraps of straw or feather or food, or climbing blades of grass as if they were trees from whose tops one could look out to explore the country. A mole throwing up its mound at the end of its burrow and making its way out at last with the long-nailed paws which looked so like elfish hands, had absorbed him one whole morning. Ants’ ways, beetles’ ways, bees’ ways, frogs’ ways, birds’ ways, plants’ ways, gave him a new world to explore and when Dean revealed them all and added foxes’ ways, otters’ ways, ferrets’ ways, squirrels’ ways, and trouts’ and water-rats’ and badgers’ ways, there was no end to the things to talk about and think over, while Sam and Gabriel ran and laughed and tumbled signed breathless to each other all over the garden.

It all seemed very like magic; and when one day Gabriel said this, Castiel became very thoughtful.

“I think there must be lots of Magic in the world,” he said, “but people don’t know what it is like or how to make it. I believe Sam knows some magic, but perhaps he doesn’t know he knows it. He charms animals and people. And Dean knows a different kind of magic, and the fakirs and snake-charmers in India know another. I am sure there is magic in everything. Perhaps there is even magic in me.”

It was the first time Gabriel had heard any such thing, but he had begun to realize that, queer as he was, Castiel had read about a great many singular things and was somehow a very convincing sort of boy. When he held up his head and fixed his strange eyes on you it seemed as if you believed him almost in spite of yourself though he was only ten years old—going on eleven.

Even on wet days it could not be said that the boys were dull. If it rained in the morning Dean and Sam would not come, because Dean did not like Sam to walk across the moors in the wet; but if it began to rain after they were at Misselthwaite all four boys would go into the house, and they would read books, or play at board games. Sometimes they explored the house, with Dean pushing Castiel in his chair. They went to the Indian room and amused themselves with the ivory elephants. They found the rose-coloured brocade boudoir and the hole in the cushion the mouse had left, but the mice had grown up and run away and the hole was empty. They saw more rooms and made more discoveries than Gabriel had made on his first pilgrimage. They found new corridors and corners and flights of steps and more old pictures they liked and strange old things they did not know the use of. Gabriel and Dean fought with the swords they found on the suits of armour, or ran races in the long picture-galleries, and Sam went into silent raptures when they discovered the library.

Castiel seemed to have found a new delight in his lessons, now that his eyes were brighter and the world seemed a vast and interesting place. In fact, he seemed to enjoy it so much that Gabriel sometimes joined in. Castiel already knew French and Latin and German quite well, from grammars and readers. He knew all the rules thoroughly, and a good deal of the vocabulary; but as nobody had ever taught him how to pronounce them he made them all sound the same as each other. As Gabriel didn’t know any better they all got along very well.

But Gabriel’s temper was not suited for any serious course of study. He learned by inspiration rather than application; and although he remembered all the words with surprising aptitude, the rules (especially of Latin) simply wouldn’t stick in his head. Nor did he have the patience to sit still for a long time, or to keep paying attention when he found anything difficult. But when Sam one day picked up one of Castiel’s books, he discovered a new passion. Sam thrived on the work; and so Castiel taught him very often, and found rather to his own surprise that in teaching he could be patient and attentive for hours. Indeed, he took such delight in teaching that it could hardly be called patience. He took pains, too, to improve Sam’s penmanship, and to teach him to write in proper English as well as in Yorkshire; and better than all of this Sam loved to read books about how things worked, and about people in faraway lands.

Gabriel found books in the library for them in all three languages, stories that looked interesting and exciting, and demanded Castiel tell him the stories. At first Castiel grew exasperated at this, because he did not think reading stories counted as _studying_ a language at all. But soon enough he was drawn into the stories himself, and into Sam’s wide-eyed delight, and Dean’s reluctant fascination. And when Castiel couldn’t quite make out what the stories meant, they would make up the missing pieces themselves, and try to do it with words in the right languages, to make each other laugh. Gabriel always liked to make Castiel frown and pout by mixing the languages all three together without order.

Dean laughed at Sam and Castiel now and then, for spending their time with dusty old books. He said loudly many times that _he_ should not spend his time at such a thing; and if Sam tried to press him, he would say that Sam was the clever one of the family, and that Castiel’s breath would only be wasted if he tried to turn Dean into a wise man.

But now and then Gabriel, bored with his lessons, would go to find him, and discover Dean curled up in one of the enormous leather chairs with high backs and arms, reading a novel with wondering eyes and a faint frown on his face.

And some days, they took books out with them to the garden; because all four of them preferred to study under the open sky with the robins and the bees than in the darkness of the library.

One afternoon, when it was just the two of them, Gabriel noticed that something new had happened in Castiel’s room. He had noticed it the day before but had said nothing because he thought the change might have been made by chance. He said nothing today but he sat and looked fixedly at the picture over the mantel. He could look at it because the curtain had been drawn aside. That was the change he noticed.

“I know what you want me to tell you,” said Castiel, after he had stared a few minutes. “I always know when you want me to tell you something. You are wondering why the curtain is drawn back. I am going to keep it like that.”

“Why?” asked Gabriel.

“Because it doesn’t make me angry any more to see her laughing. I want to see her laughing like that all the time.”

“You are so like her now,” said Gabriel, “that sometimes I think perhaps you are her ghost made into a boy.”

That idea seemed to impress Castiel. He thought it over and then answered him slowly.

“If I were her ghost—my father would be fond of me.”

Gabriel went very quiet for a moment, picking at the rug, and looked at the face of the woman in the picture. Then he said, “There is something else that I think I ought to tell you.”

Castiel sat up a little straighter and looked at him with interest. “What is it?”

“Mary said that your father is my birth father,” said Gabriel, “and your mother was my birth mother. We were both born on the same day. If they hadn’t given me to my fathers, you and I should have been twin brothers.”

Castiel stared at him for a moment, with his blue eyes wide and his mouth a little open. Then he scowled.

“Does everybody know this but me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gabriel snapped. “Of course they don’t. I don’t think Sam and Dean know. Mrs. Medlock knows, and Mary only knows because she’s _clever_. I shouldn’t think most of the other servants know or care. Why should they? They all have far more interesting things to talk about than _you_.”

Castiel threw a cushion at him. Gabriel threw it back, because Castiel looked only annoyed, not really angry.

“If I _did_ have a brother,” said Castiel haughtily, “I shouldn’t think he’d be the sort of boy to throw cushions at an invalid.”

Then he began to giggle, and so did Gabriel, and Gabriel bounced onto the bed and crossed his legs.

“You did say you wished you had a brother, once,” he said.

“If you are my cousin,” said Castiel, in his imperious way, “and you are my birth brother, and my father’s ward, that’s _practically_ the same thing as being a brother. I shall call you my brother, from now on.”

“Good,” said Gabriel. “Because even if your father never wants to see you again, you have a brother who does. But I shouldn’t think he’ll stay away much longer, not when he hears how well you’re getting.”

 

 

They did not at all know at the manor what to make of the change in Castiel, now that he was cheerful and rosy and his face did not look so sharp. His face filled out, and his body too. Gabriel gave to him some of the clothes that he himself had worn when he had first come to Misselthwaite. Castiel had Mary put them on under his pinafore every morning, so that when they got into the garden he could take off the girls’ clothes and sit on the grass dressed just like Gabriel instead.

“Your appetite is improving very much, Miss Claire,” the nurse had said one day. “You used to eat nothing, and so many things disagreed with you.”

“Nothing disagrees with me now,” replied Castiel, and then seeing the nurse looking at him curiously he suddenly remembered that perhaps he ought not to appear too well just yet. “At least things don’t so often disagree with me. It’s the fresh air.”

“Perhaps it is,” said the nurse, still looking at him with a mystified expression. “But I must talk to Dr. Shurley about it.”

“How she stared at you!” said Gabriel when he went away. “As if she thought there must be something to find out.”

“I won’t have them finding out things,” said Castiel. “No one must begin to find out yet. Perhaps I shall have to do some of my old complaining, to keep them from guessing.”

When Dr. Shurley came that morning he seemed puzzled, also. He asked a number of questions, to Castiel’s great annoyance.

“You stay out in the garden a great deal,” he suggested. “Where do you go?”

Castiel put on his favourite air of dignified indifference to opinion.

“I will not let any one know where I go,” he answered. “I go to a place I like. Every one has orders to keep out of the way. I won’t be watched and stared at. You know that!”

“You seem to be out all day but I do not think it has done you harm—I do not think so. The nurse says that you eat much more than you have ever done before.”

“Perhaps,” said Castiel, prompted by a sudden inspiration, “perhaps it is an unnatural appetite.”

“I do not think so, as your food seems to agree with you,” said Dr. Shurley. “You are gaining flesh rapidly and your colour is better.”

“Perhaps—perhaps I am bloated and feverish,” said Castiel, assuming a discouraging air of gloom. “People who are not going to live are often—different.”

Dr. Shurley shook his head. He was holding Castiel’s wrist and he pushed up his sleeve and felt his arm.

“You are not feverish,” he said thoughtfully, “and such flesh as you have gained is healthy. If you can keep this up, my girl, we need not talk of dying. Your father will be happy to hear of this remarkable improvement.”

“I won’t have him told!” Castiel scowled. “It will only disappoint him if I get worse again—and I may get worse this very night. I might have a raging fever. I feel as if I might be beginning to have one now. I won’t have letters written to my father—I won’t—I won’t! You are making me angry and you know that is bad for me. I feel hot already. I hate being written about and being talked over as much as I hate being stared at!”

“Hush! my girl,” Dr. Shurley soothed him. “Nothing shall be written without your permission. You are too sensitive about things. You must not undo the good which has been done.”

“I may be obliged to have a tantrum,” said Castiel regretfully, when he had gone. “I don’t want to have one and I’m not miserable enough now to work myself into a big one. Perhaps I couldn’t have one at all. That lump doesn’t come in my throat now and I keep thinking of nice things instead of horrible ones. But if they talk about writing to my father I shall have to do something.”

“Why don’t you want your father to know?” asked Gabriel curiously. “I should think it would make him happy, then he might come home.”

“He mustn’t come home yet,” said Castiel firmly, “not until I am quite well. I want to walk into his study one day and say, ‘Hello father, here I am. I am quite well, and I am going to live to grow up.’”

Gabriel put his hand over his mouth, so that the grown-ups outside the door should not hear him laughing. “What a shock he would get!”

Castiel made up his mind to eat less, but unfortunately it was not possible to carry out this brilliant idea when he wakened each morning with an amazing appetite and the table near his sofa was set with a breakfast of home-made bread and fresh butter, snow-white eggs, raspberry jam and clotted cream. Gabriel always breakfasted with him and when they found themselves at the table—particularly if there were delicate slices of sizzling ham sending forth tempting odours from under a hot silver cover—they would look into each other’s eyes in desperation.

“I think we shall have to eat it all this morning, Gabriel,” Castiel always ended by saying. “We can send away some of the lunch and a great deal of the dinner.”

But when it came to lunch, and to dinner, they always found themselves with such an appetite from working in the garden or going over stories or laughing and playing, that all the food was gone from their plates before they could think.

It was Gabriel who had the idea to give Dean some of their shillings, and have him go into the village every two or three days to buy food there. This was a wonderful treat; and it was a wonderful day when Dean made the discovery that in the wood in the park outside the garden there was a deep little hollow where you could build a sort of tiny oven with stones and roast potatoes and eggs in it. Roasted eggs were a previously unknown luxury and very hot potatoes with salt and fresh butter in them were fit for a woodland king—besides being deliciously satisfying. You could buy both potatoes and eggs and eat as many as you liked without; and soon all four boys shared their meals with each other in a kind of motley feast, laughing and talking with their mouths full and eating with their hands, and stealing each other’s food just for the fun of tussling for it.

One day Gabriel gave Dean very careful instructions, and more shillings than usual. When Dean came back the next day he handed Gabriel a neatly wrapped package, where Sam couldn’t see it. Gabriel unwrapped it, just to be sure, and looked with delight at the neat little notebook—sturdily bound in leather, and just the size to fit in the pocket of Sam’s coat, with a pencil attached by a string.

“This is perfect,” he said.

“Aye,” said Dean warmly, “that it is. And I’m that there thankful, Mester Gabriel.”

Sam went almost shy with his gratitude at the gift, and cradled it like a treasure. Gabriel became rather embarrassed, and was obliged to be contrary and loud for the rest of the day to make up for it. But Castiel became rather thoughtful; and that evening, he wondered to Gabriel whether Dean ought not have a present too.

“I can’t think of anything that Dean would want,” said Gabriel carelessly; “and besides, what do you give a boy who has everything? Nothing is more important to him than Sam, and so I should think that doing something for Sam is doing something for Dean as well.”

“Yes,” said Castiel, frowning as if he were thinking strange new thoughts. “Yes, I think that’s the problem. When Dean tries to think of himself, he thinks of Sam.”


	17. "The son shall answer to his father."

Dean had taken to spending some days on his own, leaving Sam with Gabriel and Castiel and roaming the moors. This meant that Castiel could not go out of doors; for, though Sam and Gabriel could push his chair well enough around the house, the paths and slopes of the gardens made their arms ache, and it would be too easy to tip the chair over by accident.

“Let him be,” said Mary, when Gabriel asked her about this. “He’s not too well used to sharin’ Sam with nobody, or bein’ indoors so much, or bein’ so little out on th’ moors. Let him roam, an’ he’ll come back.”

And so he did, every time, beaming his broad beam and bringing with him the fresh scent of the moors. He and Castiel would sit quietly together and talk, or he would come and drag Gabriel away just as Gabriel was beginning to get restless with Sam and Castiel’s eagerness to learn.

The day when Castiel lost patience with him, and snapped that he was just as clever as any of them and would enjoy learning very much if only he’d stop being a proud stubborn ass, Dean left in a huff and did not come back for three days. But when he did, he joined them at the books without a word and without meeting anybody’s eyes; and Castiel looked at him, and whispered something to Gabriel. Gabriel went and fetched the book he wanted, and Castiel slid it across the table to Dean: _Ivanhoe_ , by Sir Walter Scott.

“Keep it,” said Castiel. “I should think you’d like it.”

They did not study for long that day, as the skies were clearing and Castiel wanted to go out. So they all put on their hats and coats, and Dean pushed Castiel’s chair down the ivy walk and into the secret garden.

“Yesterday,” Dean said, once they had Castiel settled on the grass, and Sam and Gabriel had done with running about to see what had come up or put out buds in their absence, “I went to Thwaite an’ I seed Mester Benny. He’s the strongest chap on th’ moor. He’s the champion wrestler an’ he can jump higher than any other chap an’ throw th’ hammer farther, an’ I axed him some questions. I thought o’ thee, Mester Castiel, and I says, ‘How did tha’ make tha’ muscles stick out that way, Bob? Did tha’ do anythin’ extra to make thysel’ so strong?’ An’ he says, ‘Well, yes, lad, I did. A strong man in a show that came to Thwaite once showed me how to exercise my arms an’ legs an’ every muscle in my body. An’ I says, ‘Could a delicate chap make himself stronger with ‘em, Bob?’ an’ he laughed an’ says, ‘Art tha’ th’ delicate chap?’ an’ I says, ‘No, but I knows a young gentleman that’s gettin’ well of a long illness an’ I wish I knowed some o’ them tricks to tell him about.’ I didn’t say no names an’ he didn’t ask none. He’s friendly same as I said an’ he stood up an’ showed me good-natured like, an’ I imitated what he did till I knowed it by heart.”

Castiel had been listening excitedly.

“Can you show me?” he cried. “Will you?”

“Aye, to be sure,” Dean answered, getting up. “But he says tha’ mun do ‘em gentle at first an’ be careful not to tire thysel’. Rest in between times an’ take deep breaths an’ don’t overdo.”

“I’ll be careful,” said Castiel. “Show me! Dean, you are the most magic boy in the world!”

Dean stood up on the grass and slowly went through a carefully practical but simple series of muscle exercises. Castiel watched them with widening eyes. He could do a few while he was sitting down, especially of the stretching type. Gabriel and Sam began to do them also, although they stood up and did them as Dean did. Soot, who was watching the performance, became much disturbed and left his branch and hopped about restlessly because he could not do them too.

From that time the exercises were part of the day’s duties. It became possible for both Castiel and Gabriel to do more of them each time they tried, and such appetites were the results that but for the basket Dean put down behind the bush each morning when he arrived they would have been lost.

 

 

It was Dean who, when the first smells of summer came wafting in off the moor, brought to Castiel a pair of sharp new fleecing shears. He put them down in the grass without a word; and it was Castiel who picked them up, and looked them over with curious fingers, and looked up at Dean with a frown.

“Are you going to cut my hair?” said he, with a trace of his old imperious mood.

“Does tha’ want me to cut thy hair?” replied Dean, with a shrewd look in his moor-green eyes.

Castiel drew himself up, and looked Dean over. “Do you know how to cut hair?”

“Aye.” Dean grinned, broad and sweet. “I told thee before: I cut Sam’s, an’ he cuts mine.”

Castiel looked for a moment as if he did not think this much of a recommendation; but when he had toyed with the shears another minute or two, he handed them to Dean and declared that he had rather have his hair cut like Dean’s than like Sam’s.

Together they tied off his long tresses next to his head, and twisted them into plaits. Then Dean cut them off, with gentle hands. Gabriel and Sam and Captain seized on them at once as playthings, while Dean ran his fingers through the hair left over to make it stand on end, clipping it off where it stuck out between his broad fingers.

When he was done Castiel wriggled and laughed, eyes shining like a piece of sky.

“How cold it is!” he exclaimed, rubbing at the back of his neck. “It itches, Dean!”

Sam laughed too, and tried to brush away all the bits of hair that had fallen down around Castiel’s collar with a few dock leaves, and they all of them fell to giggling and exclaiming. Castiel sat up tall in his chair, and blushed, and posed, and snickered, and tried to act like a Rajah—a little more self-conscious than before, perhaps, but with a shy delight in his face that Gabriel had never seen there. They played that afternoon that Castiel was a king, then Wat Tyler, then an Indian; but when the sun began to fall, Castiel realised all at once that if it were known what they had done, Dean and Sam might be forbidden the house and grounds, or even punished.

They stayed out a little later than usual, and Dean pushed Castiel’s chair back with the blanket folded high around his head and shoulders, so that the change was not discovered until breakfast. Gabriel, who had run early in his socks and dressing gown from his room with a pair of scissors that he had stolen from a housemaid, declared boldly to Mrs. Medlock that it was he who had done it; and when she clutched at her shawl in despair and wondered what Mr. Shurley would say, Castiel replied, in his haughtiest tones:

“Mrs. Medlock, my father has no need to know of it until he should decide to see me with his own two eyes, as he has not done for six years. And when he chooses to do so, the son shall answer to his father for it.”

 

 

And the secret garden bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles. In the robin’s nest there were Eggs, and the robin’s mate sat upon them keeping them warm with her feathery little breast and careful wings. At first she was very nervous and the robin himself was indignantly watchful. Even Sam did not go near the close-grown corner in those days, but waited until by the quiet working of some mysterious spell he seemed to have conveyed to the soul of the little pair that in the garden there was nothing which was not quite like themselves—nothing which did not understand the wonderfulness of what was happening to them—the immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity of Eggs.

So long as Master Gabriel’s mind had been full of disagreeable thoughts about his dislikes and sour opinions of people and his determination not to be pleased by or interested in anything, he was a yellow-faced, sickly, bored and wretched child. Circumstances, however, were very kind to him, though he was not at all aware of it. They began to push him about for his own good. When his mind gradually filled itself with robins, and moorland cottages crowded with children, and common Yorkshire housemaids, with springtime and with secret gardens coming alive day by day, and also with a moor boy and his “creatures,” there was no room left for the disagreeable thoughts which affected his liver and his digestion and made him yellow and tired.

And then, for that matter—so long as Castiel shut himself up in his room and thought only of his fears and weakness and his detestation of people who looked at him and reflected hourly on humps and early death, he was a hysterical half-crazy little hypochondriac who knew nothing of the sunshine and the spring and also did not know that he could get well and could grow if only he tried to do it. When new beautiful thoughts began to push out the old hideous ones, life began to come back to him, his blood ran healthily through his veins and strength poured into him like a flood. Two things cannot be in one place.

While the secret garden was coming alive and four children were coming alive with it, there was a man wandering about certain far-away beautiful places in the Norwegian fjords and the valleys and mountains of Switzerland and he was a man who for ten years had kept his mind filled with dark and heart-broken thinking. He had not been courageous; he had never tried to put any other thoughts in the place of the dark ones. A terrible sorrow had fallen upon him when he had been happy and he had let his soul fill itself with blackness and had refused obstinately to allow any rift of light to pierce through.

He had travelled far and wide since the day he saw Master Gabriel in his study and told him he might have his “bit of earth.” He had been in the most beautiful places in Europe, though he had remained nowhere more than a few days. He had chosen the quietest and remotest spots. He had been on the tops of mountains whose heads were in the clouds and had looked down on other mountains when the sun rose and touched them with such light as made it seem as if the world were just being born.

But the light had never seemed to touch himself.

He had received a letter just lately that had made him rather thoughtful. He had learned by this letter that two of his distant cousins had just died at sea. Their name was Bradbury, and they had left behind them a very little money, and a girl child of about eleven years old. She had fallen to the charge of a poor old aunt, who had not the time nor the money to care for a child and bring her up in the world. The reason that Mr. Shurley had become very thoughtful was that this had made him remember something that Mary Winchester had said to him once, that Claire would soon need another girl to play with and to talk to.

It had occurred to him that he must in a year or two engage a school master to teach Gabriel, and that a master might teach two or even three children as easily as one—that he might offer to receive young Charlotte at Misselthwaite, and to take on the charge of her keep and education, and fit her to make her own way in the world, though he was himself so badly fitted to care for any child. But the truth was that Mr. Shurley, although he had a rather kind heart, had spent most of his life feeling very sorry for himself and being more than a little selfish, and he had never learned to really think very much about anybody but himself.

It is in fact very likely that, if nothing else had happened, Mr. Shurley would have forgotten his fine idea in a day or three. But as it happened, something _did_ happen that very night—and, lest the impression should fade, something else happened again the next morning—which brought the light to shine on Mr. Shurley’s life, and spurred him on to change.

 

 

One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries.

And it was like that with Gabriel and Castiel when they first saw and heard and felt the Summer inside the four high walls of a hidden garden. That afternoon the whole world seemed to devote itself to being perfect and radiantly beautiful and kind to two neglected little boys. Perhaps out of pure heavenly goodness the spring came and crowned everything it possibly could into that one place. Once Dean paused in what he was doing and stood still with a sort of growing wonder in his eyes, shaking his head softly.

“Eh! it is graidely,” he said. “I’m twelve goin’ on thirteen an’ there’s a lot o’ afternoons in thirteen years, but seems to me like I never seed one as graidely as this ‘ere.”

“Aye, it is a graidely one,” said Gabriel, and he sighed for mere happiness. “I’ll warrant it’s the graidelest one as ever was in this world.”

“Does tha’ think,” said Castiel with dreamy carefulness, “as happen it was made loike this ‘ere all o’ purpose for me?”

“My word!” cried Gabriel admiringly, “that there is a bit o’ good Yorkshire. Tha’rt shapin’ first-rate—that tha’ art.”

And merriment reigned.

They drew the chair under the plum-tree, which was snow-white with blossoms and musical with bees. It was like a king’s canopy, a fairy king’s. There were flowering cherry-trees near and apple-trees whose buds were pink and white, and here and there one had burst open wide. Between the blossoming branches of the canopy bits of blue sky looked down like wonderful eyes.

Gabriel and Dean worked a little here and there and Sam and Castiel watched them, and sometimes Castiel dug a little with the trowel or the little fork. They brought Castiel things to look at—buds which were opening, buds which were tight closed, bits of twig whose fruits were just blushing from green, the feather of a woodpecker which had dropped on the grass, the empty shell of some bird late hatched. Dean pushed the chair slowly round and round the garden, stopping every other moment to let him look at wonders springing out of the earth or trailing down from trees. It was like being taken in state round the country of a magic king and queen and shown all the mysterious riches it contained.

The robin’s eggs had hatched, and he flew back and forth as busy as anything, hopping sometimes right onto the piles of earth they dug up to find enough worms to feed his mate and all his hungry family. This made them giggle so delightedly that they were obliged to cover their mouths with their hands, remembering that they must not be heard. Castiel and Gabriel were by this time used to saying many things with their hands. They liked the mysteriousness of it and did their best, but in the midst of excited enjoyment it is rather difficult to remember not to shout and chatter, and never to laugh above a whisper.

Every moment of the afternoon was full of new things and every hour the sunshine grew more golden.

Finally there came an hour when they all lay in the grass and were quiet. The sun was dropping lower. It was that hour when everything stills itself, and they really had had a busy and exciting afternoon. Castiel looked as if he were resting luxuriously. Even the creatures had ceased moving about and had drawn together and were resting near them. Soot had perched on a low branch and drawn up one leg and dropped the grey film drowsily over his eyes. Gabriel privately thought he looked as if he might snore in a minute.

In the midst of this stillness it was rather startling when Castiel half lifted his head and exclaimed in a loud suddenly alarmed whisper:

“Who is that man?”

Gabriel scrambled to his feet.

“Man!” he cried in a low quick voice.

Castiel pointed to where the little overgrown path curved around the corner of a rose tree.

“Look!” he whispered excitedly. “Just look!”

The others wheeled about and looked. There was Mr. Shurley staring in dismay and agitation—dressed all in his shabby travelling clothes, and leaning on a stick. Because Gabriel was standing up, he only saw Gabriel first; and for a moment he stared as if he saw a ghost. But then he recovered himself, and he glared, then he actually drew himself up and shook his stick at Gabriel.

“Who told you about this place?” he snapped. “Who let you in here?”

“Nobody,” called out Gabriel, finding his breath and taking a few steps toward Mr. Shurley. “Nobody, it was the robin who showed me the way!”

Mr. Shurley gaped and stared at him. “The robin?” he repeated dumbly.

“It was the robin who showed me the way,” Gabriel repeated obstinately. “He didn’t know he was doing it but he did. And I can’t tell you from here while you’re shaking your stick at me.”

Mr. Shurley’s face changed very suddenly just then, and his jaw actually dropped as he stared pas Gabriel’s head at something he saw coming over the grass toward him.

At the first sound of his torrent of words Castiel had been so surprised that he had only sat up and listened as if he were spellbound. But in the midst of it he had recovered himself and beckoned imperiously to Dean.

“Wheel me over there!” he commanded. “Wheel me quite close!”

Dean laid a hand on his shoulder and said his name in a quiet voice; but Castiel, not hearing or not understanding, repeated the order, so that Dean obeyed.

And this, if you please, this is what Mr. Shurley beheld and which made his jaw drop. A wheeled chair with luxurious cushions and robes which came toward him looking rather like some sort of State Coach because a young Rajah leaned back in it with royal command in his great black-rimmed eyes and a thin white hand extended haughtily toward him. And it stopped right under Mr. Shurley’s nose. It was really no wonder his mouth dropped open.

“Who are you?” demanded the Rajah—and Sam leaned in against Gabriel’s side and urgently signed to him the same question.

How Mr. Shurley stared! His pale blue eyes fixed themselves on what was before him as if he were seeing a ghost. He gazed and gazed and gulped a lump down his throat and did not say a word for almost a minute. And then he said, without a look at Gabriel, “I... Eh, lass. Only an old gardener.”

“And do you know who I am?” demanded Castiel still more imperiously. “Answer!”

Mr. Shurley put his hand up and passed it over his eyes and over his forehead and then he did answer in a queer shaky voice.

“Who tha’ art?” he said. “Aye, that I do—wi’ those eyes starin’ at me out o’ tha’ mother’s face. Lord knows how tha’ come here. But tha’rt th’ master’s poor sick lass.”

Castiel forgot that he had ever had a back. His face flushed scarlet and he sat bolt upright.

“I’m not a lass!” he cried out furiously. “I am the master’s son, and I am your master while he is away!And I’m not sick! I am perfectly well!”

Mr. Shurley passed his hand over his forehead again and gazed as if he could never gaze enough. His hand shook and his mouth shook and his voice shook.

“Tha’—tha’ hasn’t got a crooked back?” he said hoarsely.

“No!” shouted Castiel.

“He hasn’t!” cried Gabriel, almost shouting in his fierce indignation. “He’s not got a lump as big as a pin! I looked and there was none there—not one!”

“Tha’—tha’ hasn’t got a weak head?” quavered Mr. Shurley more hoarsely yet.

It was too much. The strength which Castiel usually threw into his tantrums rushed through him now in a new way. Never yet had he been accused of a weak head—even in whispers—and as a boy who prided himself on his quickness at lessons and discoveries, this charge was more than flesh and blood could endure. His anger and insulted pride made him forget everything but this one moment and filled him with a power he had never known before, an almost unnatural strength.

“Come here!” he shouted to Dean and Gabriel, and he actually began to tear the coverings off his lower limbs and disentangle himself. “Come here! Come here! This minute!”

They were by his side in a second. Sam caught his breath in a short gasp and looked rather pale.

 _You can do it! you can do it!_ he gabbled over and over to himself with his hands as fast as ever he could, though none of them was looking at him.

There was a brief fierce scramble, the rugs were tossed on the ground, Dean held Castiel’s arm, the thin legs were out, the thin feet were on the grass. Castiel was standing upright—upright—as straight as an arrow and looking strangely tall—his head thrown back and his strange eyes flashing blue lightning.

“Look at me!” he flung up at Mr. Shurley . “Just look at me—you! Just look at me!”

“He’s as straight as I am!” cried Dean. “He’s as straight as any lad i’ Yorkshire!”

What Mr. Shurley did Gabriel thought queer beyond measure. He choked and gulped and suddenly tears ran down his cheeks to his beard as he struck his shaking hands together.

“Eh!” he burst forth, “th’ lies folk tells! Tha’rt as thin as a lath an’ as white as a wraith, but there’s not a knob on thee. Tha’lt make a mon yet. God bless thee!”

Dean held Castiel’s arm strongly but the boy had not begun to falter. He stood straighter and straighter and looked Mr. Shurley in the face. Dean was watching him with sharp eyes. There were scarlet spots on his cheeks and he looked amazing, but he showed no signs of falling.

“Look at me!” he commanded. “Look at me all over! Am I a hunchback? Have I got crooked legs?”

“Not tha’,” he said. “Not tha’. Nowt o’ th’ sort.”

“I’m your master,” he said, “when my father is away. And you are to obey me. This is my garden. Don’t dare to say a word about it! We did not want you, but now you will have to be in the secret.”

Mr. Shurley’s tired pale face was still wet with that one queer rush of tears. It seemed as if he could not take his eyes from thin straight Castiel standing on his feet with his head thrown back.

“Oh! Claire,” he almost whispered. “Oh! my Claire!”

And perhaps it was because the Yorkshire was quite gone from his voice all of a sudden, or perhaps it was because he had lifted his face so that his eyes shone blue as the sky and as blue as Castiel’s own, or perhaps it was some queer little instinct simply of _knowing_ ; but all at once, Castiel faltered, and he looked more carefully, and he put out his hand without looking and clutched at Gabriel’s hand so tightly it almost hurt.

“Father?” he said; and for the first time since Gabriel had known him he sounded like nothing more than a scared little girl.

Mr. Shurley was looking Castiel up and down, up and down, and then he reached out a hand as if he didn’t quite dare to touch, or to move any closer.

“You look like a real child,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Not at all like…”

“I can stand,” Castiel said, and his head was still held up and he said it quite fiercely.

“I told thee tha’ could as soon as tha’ stopped bein’ afraid,” said Dean softly. “An’ tha’s stopped.”

“Yes, I’ve stopped,” said Castiel. “And—and my name is Castiel, father. I found—I found my mother’s book of angels, and she had put a special mark next to this name, and to Gabriel’s. I think it was the one she wanted me to have, if I had been born a boy like Gabriel.”

“Claire—” said Mr. Shurley, and then he stopped, and a trembling smile crept onto his face. “ _Claire_ means light. She called you her sunbeam, when she was holding you.”

“Oh,” said Castiel stupidly. “I... I didn’t know.”

“She used to hold you,” he went on, with tears in his eyes, “and whisper to you about the light, and the sun. She called you her sun.”

“Her sun,” whispered Castiel. “her _son_.”

“It sounds like magic,” said Gabriel curiously.

Castiel looked over at Sam.

“ _This_ is magic,” he said. “I think this is the magic.”

Sam laughed and clapped his hands, then his fingers flew faster than Gabriel could follow them. Dean’s plump mouth spread in a cheerful grin.

“Tha’s doin’ magic thysel’. It’s same magic as made these ‘ere work out o’ th’ earth,” and he touched with his thick boot a clump of crocuses in the grass.

Castiel looked down at them.

“Aye,” he said slowly, “there couldna’ be bigger Magic than that there—there couldna’ be.”

He drew himself up straighter than ever.

“I’m going to walk to my father,” he said; and though Dean held his arm he was wonderfully steady. He did not give in. Gabriel was uplifted by a sudden feeling that he looked quite beautiful in spite of his thinness.

Mr. Shurley clutched at his stick as he came, leaning on it very heavily.

“How has this change happened?” he said with wonder.

“With digging and working in the garden,” said Castiel, “and with doing Dean’s exercises.”

“In the garden!” said Mr. Shurley, as if the words struck him. “In the garden!”

“Yes,” hurried on Castiel. “It was the garden that did it—and Gabriel and Dean and Sam and the creatures. It is magic. No one knows. We kept it to tell you when you came. I’m well. I’m going to be a scientist. And a philosopher! And so is Sam too.”

He said it all so like a healthy boy—his face flushed, his words tumbling over each other in his eagerness—that Mr. Shurley’s soul shook with unbelieving joy.

Castiel put out his hand and laid it on his father’s arm.

“Aren’t you glad, Father?” he ended. “Aren’t you glad? I’m going to live forever and ever and ever!”

Mr. Shurley put his hands on both Castiel’s shoulders and held him still. He knew he dared not even try to speak for a moment.

“Show me the garden, my boy,” he said at last. “And tell me all about it.”

And so they led him around.

The place was a wilderness of autumn gold and purple and violet blue and flaming scarlet and on every side were sheaves of late lilies standing together—lilies which were white, or white and ruby. He remembered well when the first of them had been planted that just at this season of the year their late glories should reveal themselves. Late roses climbed and hung and clustered and the sunshine deepening the hue of the yellowing trees made one feel that one stood in an embowered temple of gold. The newcomer stood silent just as the children had done when they came into its greyness. He looked round and round.

“I thought it would be dead,” he said.

“Gabriel thought so at first,” said Castiel. “But it came alive.”

Then they sat down under their tree—all but Castiel, who wanted to stand while he told the story.

 

 

Mary Winchester’s duties rarely took her out of the house; but on this occasion almost every servant had found some excuse to be in the gardens just outside the kitchen, or by that window in the servants’ hall that looked out over the lawn.

Rugs were taken out and beaten that had not seen the sun for years; curtains and bedsheets were shaken and hung out to air in the sun; and all of these things were done with a bustle of more extra hands than the most disorderly of housekeepers would have thought necessary.

The fact was that Mr. Shurley’s return had been a surprise to everybody, even to Mrs. Naomi Medlock—even, it seemed, to himself. The only person who did not seem entirely surprised was Mary Winchester; and if this had anything to do with a certain letter in her plain, careful hand, which opened simply with “Dear Sir” and closed with “Your obedient servant”, and which asked him in respectful and mysterious terms to come back home and added that she thought (if he would excuse her) that his lady would ask him to come, if she was here... why then, nobody need know anything about _that_ but Mary Winchester, Charles Shurley, and their Maker.

And perhaps he would have disregarded this summons, or at least have taken a more leisurely route back home, had it not been for a strange dream that had come on him the very night before the letter had reached him.

Mr. Shurley had arrived at Misselthwaite all in a rush in a post carriage, and had not even stopped to take off his hat and coat before hurrying to see the daughter whom he had never once spoken to in ten years. But he had exchanged a few hurried words with Mrs. Winchester; and though he said little, it was enough for her to guess that he had seen a vision of his dead wife, and that she too had bid him hurry home. And when Mrs. Medlock said that the children were “in the garden” Mr. Shurley seemed very struck; and for almost a minute he could do nothing but repeat those words over and over, and press his hand to his eyes, and murmur, “Just as she said.”

So it was that the household was thrown into confusion; and, save for the boy who was sent to fetch Dr. Shurley, and the two or three upper housemaids hastily preparing the master’s rooms, almost every servant in the house or gardens was on the spot—as they had hoped to be—when the most dramatic event Misselthwaite Manor had seen during the present generation actually took place.

“Well, Mary,” Mrs. Medlock was saying, for the third or fourth time, “could you have believed it?”

She was a little anxious, because she thought that perhaps Mr. Shurley would say she ought to have kept things in better order, and that he might not be at all pleased with the changes in his daughter.

“There, ma’am.” Mary patted her hand comfortably. “’Tis nothin’ short o’ a miracle how those there children have come on, an’ Mr. Shurley will see so at once.”

Mrs. Naomi Medlock was rather fond of Mrs. Winchester, because they had been at school together, and thought quite well of her opinion, so this steady little speech made her feel somewhat more sure of herself.

“There’s no denying Miss Claire has filled out well,” she agreed, “and the doctor will say so too—but her hair, Mary! and spending all day tumbling about with boys.”

“Well, ma’am, she mayn’t be a good child, an’ she mayn’t be a pretty one, but she’s a child, an’ children needs children.”

“Eh! Mary,” said Mrs. Medlock, rather pleased. “If you was a different woman an’ didn’t talk such broad Yorkshire I’ve seen the times when I should have said you was clever.”

Mary, who knew or guessed a good deal more than any other grown-up in the place, only laughed at this, and nodded solemnly toward the window which took in through the shrubbery a piece of the lawn.

“Look there,” she said, “if tha’ needs it for sure. Look what’s comin’ across th’ grass.”

When Mrs. Medlock looked she threw up her hands and gave a little shriek and every man and woman servant within hearing bolted across the servants’ hall and stood looking through the window with their eyes almost staring out of their heads.

Across the lawn came a curious procession. At its tail was a common boy with eyes like a piece of the moor, pushing a Rajah’s empty chair, with a crow perched solemnly on his shoulder. At its head came two boys, skipping and laughing and tumbling and swinging their joined hands, their cheeks flushed with health and happiness, with a young fox slipping in and out between their heels. Between them came the Master of Misselthwaite and he looked as many of them had never seen him. And by his side with his head up in the air and his hand tucked into his father’s arm and his eyes full of laughter—a little unsteady perhaps, but as straight and proud as any boy in Yorkshire—

Master Castiel!


End file.
